On a rainy night in November 1970, an airplane crash took the lives of 75 people, including nearly every member of Marshall University's Thundering Herd football team. One year later, with a team composed almost exclusively of freshmen, the squad - renamed the Young Thundering Herd - pulled off one of the great victories in collegiate sports history.
We Are Marshall is the story of that tragedy, that team and that victory. It's a story of grief, of moving past loss, of honoring the departed by not neglecting those who remain. Maybe that all sounds mawkish and a little too calculatedly rah-rah, but Marshall's filmmakers - director McG (Charlie's Angels) and first-time screenwriter Jamie Linden - have enough confidence in their material to let the story stand on its own and (largely) avoid cheap sentimentality. The result is a movie that inspires without pontificating and plays on the heartstrings without pounding on them incessantly.
