I don’t know what expectations there were for Liquid Rising or even what the makers, Krukar & co., set out to make exactly, but what we have here is not a single whole product but a neatly packaged group of beginnings of other unmade documentaries.
Lasting around 90 minutes the film is sectioned into ten slices, one for each member of Liquid, though there are some exceptions, namely the final two segments dedicated to Taeja and Zenio, and HuK respectively. This means we get a bit more than ten minutes of footage on each player, which is really barely enough to give us an outline of their personalities while hinting at their struggles and successes. This is Rising’s single great flaw and it is also the reason it is not a particularly good documentary. The issues are not technical, indeed the film is shot competently, even colored with hand-drawn animations by tl.net’s fishuu, and interspersed with interviews of notable esports personalities such as Day9 and djWheat. There’s no lack of bells and whistles, certainly, but if you go into Rising expecting insight or revelation you are going to be disappointed.
This is understandable, perhaps even forgivable, if we consider the problems inherent in tackling a progaming team’s entire roster. There is no doubt the team management wanted to give each player his due, leave no one outside the limelight, although it becomes inevitable that such recent additions as Zenio and Taeja get the short end of the stick. You can empathise with this conundrum, but a far better choice would have been to provide a bird’s eye view of the entire team, focusing perhaps on the experience of a few players at the expense of the others, but producing the kind of depth which makes viewing documentaries a worthwhile experience. As it is, I did not learn anything I didn’t already know about Team Liquid, which begs the question, who was Rising made for?
Its superficiality wouldn’t suit an outsider and it doesn’t offer anything new to those who already follow the team. We all know the story of TLO’s beard, we all saw HayprO beat NesTea that one time long ago. That’s all we get. We could have learned as much from glancing at their Liquipedia pages.
Case in point: there’s an elegant segment about TLO’s beard adventure, in which the story of the bet which caused it is followed by a series of identical shots of different tournaments in which TLO’s beard gets longer and longer. It’s a wonderful and understated manner of visual narration, but unfortunately it doesn’t cut it. What isn’t outright mentioned is the failure which prevents the cutting of the beard, and that - failure - is a topic relevant to every athlete, more so to the notably talented but underachieving core which comprises Liquid. This is a current which is always present but frustratingly never explored.
Krukar and Nazgul owed their fans a better view of the team’s struggles. TLO’s optimism and hard work is all nice and good but how far can it take you if you don’t offset them with the challenges he has had to overcome? HayprO may have had a couple of amazing series but that was an exceptional event in the career of an otherwise unexceptional player surrounded by the splendor of his peers. How does HayprO deal with that? We never know. What of Jinro’s slump, which has been going on for years, a topic interesting not just for someone coming into the world of esports fresh but for the fans who have always been behind him? Again there is nothing. Instead there is the story of his punching a wall, a mere point of amusement.
There is plenty of meat in Liquid, but Rising only gives us the entrée. Viewers will quickly notice the pattern: everybody talks about how great everybody else is. Yes, Liquid is full of talent and charisma, but what else is there? I kept waiting for the real thing to start. There are some truly touching stories, and I only wish they had been better explored. Instead we are whisked off to the next segment, and the next one, in a kind of impatient guided tour.
Sports documentaries have been a tradition conspicuously absent in the world of progaming, an unplumbed opportunity given the amount of material available. It would be enough to camp the GSL qualifiers or chronicle the Courage tournaments of the past - not to mention the struggles of foreign players braving Korea - to gather enough footage for not just one but many and varied films. Guinea Pig’s recent retirement reminded me of Hoop Dreams, Steve James’s brilliant and moving documentary about two innercity highschool students and their struggle to become basketball pros. Their story is universal. So is TLO’s, and HayprO’s and Jinro’s. Pity we never got to know them.
