Review by Leonard Norwitz

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DTS-HD Master Audio English 3986 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 3986 kbps / 24-bit (DTS Core: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 1536 kbps / 24-bit)
DTS Audio French 768 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 768 kbps / 24-bit
DTS Audio Spanish 768 kbps 5.1 / 48 kHz / 768 kbps / 24-bit
Dolby Digital Audio English 192 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 192 kbps / Dolby Surround

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English SDH, French, Spanish, none

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The Film: 8

Coach Gaines' philosophy of football – especially high school football – is a lot like the approach many guys take toward war and sex: It's something you wait all your life for up to this point. You give it your all, never quite sure what's driving you, and then it's all over, and all you have to show for it are memories.

This may seem a stretch, but I think the citizens of the west Texas town of Odessa would have to concur. Odessa, at least seen through the eyes of director Peter Berg, strikes me as a town well on its way to becoming like Anarene (The Last Picture Show). In a peculiarly American mix of pride and desperation, all they live for is football. Mothers coach their sons on statistics and plays; fathers humiliate their sons in front of the team for fumbling; coaches are fired for not winning championships; daughters seem hell bent on making it with every team player possible; businesses close for the Friday night game; school – as a institution of learning – is removed from sight and mind. It's a town who helped fill the Astrodome for a championship game. It's a place where football is as important as the church. Maybe more so.

In such a setting, the coach is not the central figure – or even on whom winning and losing depends. Peter Berg takes a rather Tolstoyian view of things: It's not the generals that win wars, it's the soldiers that fight them. And, indeed, the focus here is not Coach Gaines, ably played by the single A-list star in the movie, Billy Bob Thornton, it is his team – dramatized primarily by the fortunes of a handful of its players.

These include Boobie Miles (Derek Luke): with his winning smile and an ego that any Texan would be proud to own, he jogs about town and into the locker room with all the assurance of an Apollo. Though he has the scholastic abilities of a third grader, his future is assured. And for good reason: Miles is one dynamite athlete, and it is on him that his team and the hopes of the whole town rest. Just as in a melodrama, the unthinkable happens when an on-field knee injury puts an end to his future and the aspirations of the team for the championship.

The team's quarterback, Mike Winchell (Lucas Black), is a tortured soul with a modestly mentally ill mother, who watches over her son's career like a coach with an intensely personal interest. After Miles' injury, Winchell is called upon to actually do his job which, up to then, amounted little more than handing the ball off to Boobie and watch him do his thing.

Then there's Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), whose father (Tim McGraw), a former Panther champion player, enjoys humiliating his son at every fumble. If we hadn't gotten the point by now, it is in this relationship that we see clearly that all these men have is this year, because even after being a star player in high school, there is no future for him in Odessa – thus Anarene.

While the actors who play the high-schoolers are in their twenties and early thirties, they are convincing enough. Anyhow, it is their personal dramas that rivet our attention, and in this they are formidable players, if not unsubtle. Thornton's idea of Gaines is to give away nothing to those off the field who would influence him, and give away everything on the field. It is both refreshing and disturbing to see how he handles Billingsley's outrageous bursts of rage during a game. Gaines knows full well where this all comes from, yet he offers the boy no shoulder to cry on. Instead he's more like John Wayne urging his men up Suribachi, he gives no quarter. . . not until his final speech at halftime. . . and it's a winner..

Extras: 6
The DVD has been with us since early in 2005, and all the bonus features from that disc are present here in all there 480p glory – which is to say, that they look only fair on Blu-ray. The commentary track is full of anecdotes about the real events and how they were interpolated into the movie. Probably the most interesting of the featurettes is "The Story of the 1988 Permian Panthers" which brings together the actual players and fans for their insights about the real events and the film about them offers more insight into the characters. Finally, BD-Live 2.0 is up to its usual fun tricks.