My Review of "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"

Eurovision Song contest: The Story of Fire Saga is a huge title for basically a run of the mill Will Farrell movie. You'll see a ton of the usual Will Farrell tropes in this movie and that isn't a bad thing especially if you're a fan of his movies like I am. Will Farrell hasn't had a big movie for a little while so it was kind of a pleasant surprise to see this movie come out of nowhere exclusively on Netflix.

This movie starts out in a small town in Iceland with the young version of the main character Lars sitting by the stairs all depressed because of the loss of his mother. Family and friends are watching the Eurovision Song Contest on TV. All of a sudden they had a band called Abba play. Upon listening to this band Lars is inspired and for the first time he's distracted from the loss of his mother.

With Lars newly motivated another child in the room gets inspired as well. This girl by the name Sigrit is apparently a mute. She's dances alongside Lars when Abba plays on the television. Lars declares that he is going to win Eurovision Song Contest one day.

Fast forward over 30 years later we see Lars and Sigrit still together and they've created a band called Fire Saga. Their goal is still to win Eurovision but they have to win the preliminary trials first before getting to the actual contest.

Meanwhile the Icelandic Eurovision organizers have great hopes for winning Eurovision because of a brand new talent. They believe they have it on lock but there's one member that worries that Iceland would be put into bankruptcy if they do win the competition. Should they win this year's contest they have to host the following year's competition.

With this new contestant being an obvious winner for Iceland they don't really care who else is going to compete in the preliminaries. This is how Fire Saga end up being able to join the preliminaries. The movie is pretty crazy but it really gets pretty wild from there.

That's what we know and love about Will Farrell movies though. He's an egotistical man-child sociopath in most of his movies and this one isn't any different. His character Lars is all too familiar but if you're not used to this you might not really like his character at all. His characters usually have the usual timeline where the character is endearing at first. He's oblivious of what's around him and so focused at the task at hand that he doesn't realize his mistakes. He only finds out about what's really important at the end of the movie to reconcile with those that he did wrong.

He's also in a generally low social position with incredibly high goals in mind. I think this part kind of helps a general audience relate to his characters. Being from a small town with big dreams is an all too common thing that we find everywhere. It's always nice to root for the underdog of the story no matter how much of a screw up he is.

The movie also has a few social commentaries throughout the runtime. They talk about a whole slew of things like Europe's social attitudes that might be contrary to North American. They have commentary on the importance of a country's spending habits. It even goes so far as to talk about Russian laws against sexual preference and American tourists in Europe.

These are certainly things that I didn't expect the movie to dive into when it's about a European singing contest. It felt like it had a little more substance than I really expected. With all the social commentary that they gave us it also gives us a look into the Icelandic culture. I hope they were accurate about some of the cultural things they talk about in this movie. Some of the visuals of Iceland were really nice and remind us again why people go to visit Iceland.

As a comedy it definitely delivers. I love this type of goofy humor and I find that nowadays we don't really have too many comedies come out. I had a few burst out loud moments in this movie. It's been a long time that I've been able to laugh this much at a movie.

Overall, I really liked this movie. It was very aware of itself and I think that they didn't get to promote this movie as well as they hoped to. It's too bad because I think it should have been promoted better. I have to give this movie an 8 out of 10. I really enjoyed this one and will recommend to others.