I am a basketball player of athletic built (work outs in the gym for 2 years now) and I personally am against the use of performance enhancing drugs or anabolic steroids (in sports).
I was pretty mixed up after finishing this movie because I was never really sure if it was deliberate to weaken both the shown pro and anti steroid arguments, or if the movie simply sucks. Third possibility, the director and writers give an insight of how weird the mind processing of a (ex-)steroid user is.
The reason why I ask myself this is because never ever a clear position on steroids in sports or in general seems to be taken and every time we have a point we are quickly served a counter argument.
So now what? Let everybody do what he thinks is right? Can we blame America's competitive society for the popularity of steroids among gym rats? Seriously? On the pro-steroid side, we are presented with a lot of (mislead but also some successful) steroid takers who all seem like they don't get their mindset right, but on the anti-steroid side we have a politician heavily involved in the fight of steroids who has no clue what he's talking about.
Does this mean that both sides are lead by unknowing amateurs that APPEAR to be great (bulky on one side, politician on the other) but that in REALITY they both pretty much lost track of who they are and what they initially wanted to achieve? Maybe so, that's at least what I thought, which would make the director great.
Why else would he let steroid users say that since everybody takes 'em, they want to they 'em too, to stay competitive. Are we to choose a position on that? Is the movie provoking us to decide first for ourselves whether the use of steroids is bad and then for others? After all, many points in the movie go that direction to let everybody decide for himself what he thinks about steroids.
For instance, we have the director explain to us that steroids are banned, illegal, ill received but that everybody condemning it did either take them (Governor Schwarzenegger) or support their use (in Sports, like ex-President G.W. Bush).
To prove a point, he creates his own supplement, deliberately showing off that most of the stuff must be total sh**. Same thing with the photo-shopping of ads.
The main supporters are supposed to be the fans that love and want more performance from their favorite athletes. So some are accused to play blind and others want it to be in order to ignore that, while we officially don't like cheating in sports, we, secretly, want it.
Is the use of steroids then simply the result of what happens if your inner dirt bag takes over? Then that is does not pay off, because 99.99% of the steroid addicted gym rats achieve NOTHING in life but side effects? Talking about side effects, Mikes wife claims to not witness any on her husband, but she could by lying.
Just as Barry Bonds says "You all lied". We all somewhere did. Maybe we should clean our closets first but truth be told, the no closet will ever get cleaned, they will all get dirtier.
So here we are: steroids are bad, they are cheats, but then again they do not replace talent, there are other more dangerous drugs, then some side effects are reversible, some are not (those remain of course unmentioned in this movie) etc. etc, We could go on with that mindset and go nowhere, but I dare to find one point in this whole movie: Everybody has dirt on his hands but prefers to wash someone else's first while hiding theirs behind their back.
There is also a letdown in this movie. That there IS a way to look like your role model or to at least feel to have achieved something great like your sports role model: work hard and earn it with honest effort. Unlike Johnson's stripped gold medal, that hard earned silver medal makes you an honest smiler.
And happy with no negative side effects.
I was pretty mixed up after finishing this movie because I was never really sure if it was deliberate to weaken both the shown pro and anti steroid arguments, or if the movie simply sucks. Third possibility, the director and writers give an insight of how weird the mind processing of a (ex-)steroid user is.
The reason why I ask myself this is because never ever a clear position on steroids in sports or in general seems to be taken and every time we have a point we are quickly served a counter argument.
So now what? Let everybody do what he thinks is right? Can we blame America's competitive society for the popularity of steroids among gym rats? Seriously? On the pro-steroid side, we are presented with a lot of (mislead but also some successful) steroid takers who all seem like they don't get their mindset right, but on the anti-steroid side we have a politician heavily involved in the fight of steroids who has no clue what he's talking about.
Does this mean that both sides are lead by unknowing amateurs that APPEAR to be great (bulky on one side, politician on the other) but that in REALITY they both pretty much lost track of who they are and what they initially wanted to achieve? Maybe so, that's at least what I thought, which would make the director great.
Why else would he let steroid users say that since everybody takes 'em, they want to they 'em too, to stay competitive. Are we to choose a position on that? Is the movie provoking us to decide first for ourselves whether the use of steroids is bad and then for others? After all, many points in the movie go that direction to let everybody decide for himself what he thinks about steroids.
For instance, we have the director explain to us that steroids are banned, illegal, ill received but that everybody condemning it did either take them (Governor Schwarzenegger) or support their use (in Sports, like ex-President G.W. Bush).
To prove a point, he creates his own supplement, deliberately showing off that most of the stuff must be total sh**. Same thing with the photo-shopping of ads.
The main supporters are supposed to be the fans that love and want more performance from their favorite athletes. So some are accused to play blind and others want it to be in order to ignore that, while we officially don't like cheating in sports, we, secretly, want it.
Is the use of steroids then simply the result of what happens if your inner dirt bag takes over? Then that is does not pay off, because 99.99% of the steroid addicted gym rats achieve NOTHING in life but side effects? Talking about side effects, Mikes wife claims to not witness any on her husband, but she could by lying.
Just as Barry Bonds says "You all lied". We all somewhere did. Maybe we should clean our closets first but truth be told, the no closet will ever get cleaned, they will all get dirtier.
So here we are: steroids are bad, they are cheats, but then again they do not replace talent, there are other more dangerous drugs, then some side effects are reversible, some are not (those remain of course unmentioned in this movie) etc. etc, We could go on with that mindset and go nowhere, but I dare to find one point in this whole movie: Everybody has dirt on his hands but prefers to wash someone else's first while hiding theirs behind their back.
There is also a letdown in this movie. That there IS a way to look like your role model or to at least feel to have achieved something great like your sports role model: work hard and earn it with honest effort. Unlike Johnson's stripped gold medal, that hard earned silver medal makes you an honest smiler.
And happy with no negative side effects.
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