The story is based on the 2008 John Carlin book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation about the events in South Africa before and during the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
The Springboks were not expected to perform well, the team having only recently returned to high-level international competition following the dismantling of apartheid—the country was hosting the World Cup, thus earning an automatic entry.
His presidency faces enormous challenges in the post-Apartheid era, including rampant poverty and crime, and Mandela is particularly concerned about racial divisions between black and white South Africans, which would lead to violence.
They then continue to defy all expectations and, as Mandela conducts trade negotiations in Taiwan, defeat France in heavy rain to advance to the final against their other arch-rival: New Zealand, known as the All Blacks.
New Zealand and South Africa were universally regarded as the two greatest rugby nations, with the Springboks then the only side to have a winning record (20–19–2) against the All Blacks, since their first meeting in 1921.
Mandela's security detail receives a scare when, just before the match, a South African Airways Boeing 747-200 jetliner flies in low over the stadium.
[14] On 18 March 2009, Scott Eastwood was cast as flyhalf Joel Stransky (whose drop goal provided the Springboks' winning margin in the 1995 final).
The website's critical consensus is: "Delivered with typically stately precision from director Clint Eastwood, Invictus may not be rousing enough for some viewers, but Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman inhabit their real-life characters with admirable conviction.
[19] Critic David Ansen wrote:[20] Anthony Peckham's sturdy, functional screenplay, based on John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy, can be a bit on the nose (and the message songs Eastwood adds are overkill).
It has moments evoking great emotion, as when the black and white members of the presidential security detail (hard-line ANC activists and Afrikaner cops) agree with excruciating difficulty to serve together.
My wife, Chaz, and I were taken to the island early one morning by Ahmed Kathrada, one of Mandela's fellow prisoners, and yes, the movie shows his very cell, with the thin blankets on the floor.
You regard that cell and you think, here a great man waited in faith for his rendezvous with history.Shave Magazine's Jake Tomlinson wrote:[22] Eastwood's film shows how sport can unify people, a straightforward and moving message that leaves audiences cheering.
Definitely, worth seeing.Variety's Todd McCarthy wrote:[23] Inspirational on the face of it, Clint Eastwood's film has a predictable trajectory, but every scene brims with surprising details that accumulate into a rich fabric of history, cultural impressions and emotion.