GOAT - A Second-Screen Execution Of A First-Rate Premise
So I saw Goat recently, and I have thoughts™.
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Let’s begin with the good. The movie has a solid premise: a fantasy furry basketball movie with an underdog story. Most of the jokes in the movie land really well, and many of the characters are very strongly designed.
With the full disclosure that I am White™, and so cannot confidently nor authoritatively discuss this, the movie is clearly heavily influenced by Black culture. Again, I cannot tell you how deep or well executed that influence is, so please seek out voices other than mine for that assessment. What I will assert is that the movie strongly demonstrates the exploitative relationship Capitalisim has with Black culture. Will’s hometown is the origin point of Roarball, a fictionalized variant of basketball, and yet his team’s owner holds a clear contempt of the city, the fans, and the team members. It’s a very obvious parallel to Black music, Black fashion, the exploitation of Black athletes, and many other facets of Black culture; showcasing a desire to exploit the culture for profit while similtaneously whitewashing it and forcing out the very people who give it a desireable identity.
Also in the positives is the queerness in the movie. There is not a lot, I’ll grant you, but there are a few nods to queer characters in the story. Will’s friend blushes on seeing Jett enter the diner, and in an earlier scene brushes off a question of who she’s going on a date with by using a your mom joke. There’s not many scenes with her, but her behavior may imply an attraction to women. There’s also a two time gag of two fans asking Modo to marry them, one a man and the other a woman. The joke seems to be less at the expense of queerness, and more just about them competing for the affection of their idol. Will also looks up to Jett specifically, a female Roarball athlete. Roarball is not sex segregated in Goat, meaning this isn’t him wanting to be in the WNBA over the NBA, so this can obviously just be him idolizing his hometown’s star player. Still, Will vocalizes a wish to be just like Jett, and there’s a one-off gag where another teammate refers to Will as his daughter (which is funny, not transphobic, and makes sense in context), so there is a small amount of very loose evidence for an Egg Will reading of Goat. If there is a Goat 2, Will transitioning and thus giving the story a vehicle to explore the struggles trans people face in sports would be a bold direction to bring the queer elements into the forefront. Having a main character who is not just Black-coded, but Black-coded and trans, would be an incredible direction to take this children’s series.
But now we get to the negatives, and there are unfortunately two big ones. Firstly, the voice acting really falls flat in many areas. Characters feel like they’re reading off a script, not emoting, and it’s prominent enough in the film across so many characters that either this was bad voice direction, huge time constraints on recording, or someone seriously messed up and used earlier takes of the VO.
The more notable problem, if you can believe it, is the editing pace of this movie. Every single scene feels like it’s edited with the pace of a movie trailer, which is really grating on an hour and a half movie. There are even one or two obvious audio splices, the kind you expect in movie trailers. The scenes where Will and Jett jump the subway gate and the following scenes where they have a down-to-earth moment in the diner are very similar in their pacing. This serves the action and sports scenes well, but kills the emotional impact of conversations. It feels like this movie is scared to have a slow moment where characters talk to each other like people. Character arcs feel rushed or non-existent, forgiveness feels rapid fire and easily handed out, plot beats happen so quickly and conveniently you almost expect Will to wake up and realize he’s dreaming, and most conversations feel robbed of weight. The various action and montage scenes also lose some of their impact since the editing makes so much of this movie feel like a montage, even the heartfelt conversations.
The flat voice work and the trailerhouse style editing bring the term “second-screen entertainment” to mind. If you don’t know, second-screen entertainment is the philosophy streaming services like Netflix have with their shows and movies, assuming audiences are merely passively watching media while on instagram or filling out job applications. Put another way: the reason characters in made-for-streaming media repeat themselves or describe scenes that just happened is because streamers think you weren’t paying attention. If you still don’t get it: Netflix and other streaming services assume that you watch their media while scrolling through TikTok, so they’re constantly making characters repeat things that you just saw or heard, making an active watching experience more terrible. In a similar vein, Goat feels like it is constantly running at a breakneck pace, not because the story is so action packed, but because it assumes you will immediately be on your phone if it ever slows down.
I think of Across the Spider-Verse, another Sony Pictures animation, and how its two hour and twenty minute run time compares to Goat’s hour and forty minutes. Spider-Verse varies up the pacing and expects you’ll still watch when the scene changes from action to emotion. By contrast, Goat seems to have no trust in its brainrotted, TikTok-addled audience. Goat is a good movie with great things to say and show, but it feels so cut down for time that the final cut does the movie and story a huge disservice.
