Reviewing 'Into The Wind', Steve Nash's Telling Of The Terry Fox Story

Unlike the hour-long "Into the Wind", I'm going to keep this review short.

I understand that ESPN's 30-for-30 format is an 60-minute documentary and there are plenty of stories that need that kind of length to do them full justice.

"The Two Escobars", ESPN's telling of the intersection between drug lord Pablo Escobar and Columbian futbol star Andres Escobar, is a perfect example. That was a brilliant and fascinatingly complex story that needed every second of the air time given.

I came to that story knowing the basics, but learned so much more during the show. 

That was not the case with the story of Terry Fox bravely attempting to run across Canada with one leg lost to bone cancer to raise money and awareness for cancer research. I presume most people knew that going in.

What I learned over the course of the hour could have easily fit into 15 minutes ... 30, max.

I am no film expert, so I am hesitant to review the craft of the film's production, but to my untrained eye it was pretty straight-forward. There was nothing that jumped out and grabbed me beyond a fairly standard telling of Fox's tale. We saw Fox running (a lot). We saw Fox struggling with the pressures of being an instant Canadian hero. We saw Fox stop running when the cancer returned to his body.

Perhaps the most interesting moment, and one that I would have liked to have seen explored further, was a Canadian woman explaining that her country had no Martin Luther King to rally around and Fox served as a projection of the gritty national character. 

Fox's story, as inspiring as it was, lacks context without fully understanding its meaning and appeal to the Canadian people. Perhaps the native Nash took that for granted since he was an impressionable youth when his fellow British Columbia resident ingrained himself in the national lore.

I get the appeal of the story and certainly have all the sympathy in the world for Fox and his valiant achievement, but I am hard-pressed to think that story gets green-lit if anyone other than Steve Nash is involved.