I will admit right up front that I was not looking forward to watching Chariots of Fire. I had never seen it before, but it looked like it would be terribly boring, and most of the people with whom I spoke about it confirmed that notion. With that said, I think I went into watching this film with such low expectations that there was at least the possibility that I could be pleasantly surprised, and that is in fact what happened. While this isn’t close to my favorite Oscar winner, it’s close to my least favorite either. The film actually tells a fairly compelling story from two different points of view, and while I do have some major problems with how the story was told, it at least held my interest and I never felt particularly bored while watching it.

Chariots of Fire is about two runners trying to prepare for the 1924 Olympics, and both have designs on becoming the fastest man on earth. The main character is Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a Jewish man who has been dealing with antisemitism his whole life, and especially now that he’s studying at Cambridge University, antisemitism is in his face all the time. This antisemitism motivates him, and in fact makes him obsessed with proving their prejudices wrong. He attacks running in a maniacal way and his desire to be the best runner completely takes over his life.

The other runner is Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a devout Christian from Scotland who believes that he’s doing the Lord’s work by running. He believes that God made him fast and that he’s showing glory to God by running. Eric has external pressures as well, but his come from his family and friends who want to see him dedicate his life solely to God. His family runs a mission in China, and he’s come back to Scotland to try and make the Olympic team as a means of proselytizing and showing God’s greatness through his running.

Chariots of Fire is based on a true story and like all instances of films based on true stories, it’s difficult to remain faithful to what really happened, and fit everything into a nice, well-structured story. Life never really happens in 3-Act structure, so it can be very challenging to fit real life events into that rigid of a system. It also can be difficult to fabricate drama where perhaps there wasn’t any. That being said, I do have some issues with the film’s story, and I think the filmmakers did themselves a disservice by not taking a little more creative license. For example, I feel that they could have done a better job of creating a rivalry between Abrahams and Liddell. There is a rivalry of sorts, and they actually race against each other with Liddell coming out as the winner, and Abrahams is nearly devastated. He uses the loss to hire running coach Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), who helps him shave time off of his 100-meter sprint, and also draws the ire of Cambridge’s Master of Trinity (Sir John Gielgud) and Master of Caius (Lindsay Anderson). Those two are among the most anti-Sematic characters in the film and are looking for any way possible to knock Abrahams down a couple of pegs, since it doesn’t sit well with them that a Jew could be representing their school in the Olympic Games, especially a Jew who is being trained by an Englishman of Italian descent.

Other than that, there is very little direct interaction between the two main characters in the film. Abrahams does seem to become obsessed with beating Liddell, but Liddell doesn’t seem to care at all about Abrahams, and then they end up competing in totally different races in the Olympics anyway. There is some drama surrounding each of their respective events, but overall I felt that the climax of the film was anything but climactic and I feel that as an audience, we’re left wanting more.

Ultimately, this is a story about being true to yourself and not having to apologize for who you are or for what you believe in. I think the most dramatic example of that is when the schedule comes out and the event that Liddell qualified for is scheduled for Sunday. Being a man of piety, Liddell refuses to compete. He tells his coach and is pressured by everyone from the head of the Olympic committee to the Prince of Wales to run. They tell him that he must run for Britain, but he tells them that he must not run because Sunday is God’s day, and he will not betray God. For Liddell, God is first and country is second. It looks for the entire world that there is an impasse until Lord Andrew Lindsay, one of Liddell’s teammates and a classmate of Abrahams at Cambridge, volunteers to give up his spot in the 400-meter race so that Liddell can compete in that race instead. Everyone agrees that that’s a good compromise and Liddell ends up winning that race over the top American runners who most people felt going in were the best runners in the world.

I think that this film is another example, Like Kramer vs. Kramer a couple of years earlier, of a film not ending on a high note. As I mentioned, the ending is rather anti-climactic and the two characters that we’ve been waiting to face off against each other never do. In a way, Chariots of Fire is really two separate stories told against the same backdrop with two different main characters that live in two separate worlds and just happen to end up in the same place. Indeed, even once they’re on the same Olympic team, we never see them interact with each other, bond with each other or hate each other. They’re both just sort of there, occupying the same place, but each with his own story that are being told concurrently.

There is one other thing that I have to mention about Chariots of Fire and that is the music. We’re all familiar with the iconic opening piano theme, and that theme has been used and parodied many times in the decades since the film came out. It’s powerful music, instantly recognizable and conjures up feelings of triumph. However, the rest of the score by Vangelis is absolutely dreadful. It’s heavy eighties synthesizer and it is completely disconnected from the images that are on screen. The year was 1981 and synthesizers were becoming as integral to pop music as the electric guitar had been to the arena rock of the seventies. Clearly the filmmakers viewed the synthesizer as the most popular way to play music at that time, and maybe they wanted to take subject matter that would not have been relatable to contemporary audiences and do something to make it modern. So at every emotional high and low moment, when you’re expecting score to come in, we were exposed to this nauseating heavy synth that would completely take us out of the moment and make us realize that we were watching a film about the 20’s that was made in the 80’s. And it would be one thing if the music was at least good, but it really wasn’t. There is no orchestration in the film and the only non-synthesizer music happens when someone happens to be playing the piano or some other instrument on screen. It would not surprise me if the entire score of the film came out of one synthesizer, and the score almost ruins what is actually little more than an average film. Just to show how out of tune (no pun intended) the Academy was that year, Chariots of Fire also won the Oscar for Best Music, Original Score. To be honest, that might be the single biggest mistake the Academy has ever made.

Did the Academy get it right?

Well, here’s the thing. It was a pretty weak year. Raiders of the Lost Ark was nominated for Best Picture. Now, I love that film. It’s highly entertaining and actually has a story that is structured along the lines of the Hero’s Journey almost to a tee. But let’s be honest. If you didn’t already know that it was nominated for Best Picture in 1981, you’re probably pretty surprised by learning that fact. On Golden Pond starring Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda was also nominated, and that is a thoughtful film about generational clashes, but it’s a smaller film in the scope of things. It might have won the Oscar had it come out thirty years earlier, but not at the dawn of the eighties. I’ve never seen Atlantic City so I can’t really speak to that film. The film that probably should have won, and the film that I would have voted for was Reds, Warren Beatty’s epic film about John Silas “Jack” Reed, a journalist how covered the Russian Revolution. Jack Reed was a radical and a communist sympathizer and with Ronald Reagan having just moved into the White House and the country in general moving back towards a hard line against communism, it’s entirely possible that it just wasn’t politically feasible for a film like Reds to win the Oscar in that type of climate.