I enjoyed it and it was fantastic to see the behind the scenes stuff with the directors and the players.
The best bit was seeing Pep in action. The guy is absolutely off his head. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, he’s a mad genius. He’s far more animated and aggressive than his public persona, and it was great to see him at work.
On the downside, I have to agree with what some other posters have said, I thought some of the production decisions really let the series down. It was good, but it could have been so much better.
Firstly, the narration. I love Ben Kingsley as an actor, he has a superb speaking voice and clearly has some local affinity if he went to Manchester Grammar. But I felt it was very clear from his delivery that he had no affinity for football whatsoever. There was no passion in his delivery. I don’t think he was helped by a very mediocre script, but there were certain common football phrases that you could just tell in his delivery he had no affinity with the subject.
I think the score was also poor, it was too melodramatic and sounded like it was more suitable for a low budget heist movie set in Eastern Europe. It didn’t capture the emotion of the season at all, and the bits that made you feel the most were when there was no music at all.
I also think the narrative structure was extremely poor, and the thing that really let it down. Other than episode 7, there was no narrative, nothing distinctive from episode to episode. Really it was just a drawn out season review DVD.
It’s quite difficult with sport not to just have a chronological structure, but the best sports documentary I’ve ever seen narrative wise was the 24/7 on Mayweather vs De LaHoya and Mayweather vs Hatton. Each episode had a theme and was edited in such a way to stir emotion while getting you engaged in the story / theme of the episode.
This All or Nothing did a lousy job of that for me. Much more should have been made about the groundbreaking style of play we played. Much more tension should have been added about us getting the 18 straight wins. Much more tension and release about us getting to the 100 points. Much more build up to all of the records we broke. They kind of served as a footnote, but the whole series should have been based around them for me.
The quality of the filming, the access etc was superb. It’s fantastic we’ve got all of this footage from such a groundbreaking season. But as a standalone documentary, I think the production and editing really let it down.
Look at how the production and editing of Senna could engage non-F1 fans, or Amy engaged people who weren’t Amy Winehouse fans. The production crew had the same opportunity with All or Nothing to do the same with City, but even though they had the material to make a masterpiece, they ultimately fell short.
I’d love to see what an experienced documentary team like those that did Senna, Amy and Supersonic could do with all that footage. Maybe there’s a two hour long masterpiece in there somewhere.
