Here is the main reason they don’t release the All 22: The NFL and the networks don’t want us to experience football as a game, but as a hyper-real production of a game, in the way war movies are hyper-real versions of war. In a (non-documentary) war or military movie, while there may be a few establishing shots of the battle-field, more often than not the camera is tight on the soldiers’ faces, on the guns, or there are medium shots of a handful or less of men. Can you imagine watching a ten-minute battle scene all done from a zoomed-out fixed camera on a crane? No. It’s not done because what tends to really grip us as viewers are the people and individual, easily observable physical acts and dramas. Pearl Harbor, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan: not one of these blockbusters would work without all those tight shots on the leading men’s faces and close or medium shots of the action in the sea, on the field or in the air.
