Review | Arnold Schwarzenegger is not challenged at all in Netflix’s swashbuckling Arnold documentary series

Netflix’s three-part Arnold documentary tells almost nothing about the real person. The biggest sin of the Netflix series is once again the service’s style of filling all its titles with mind-numbing idleness.

If Netflix were to get the exclusive rights to the second coming of Jesus, then a documentary about that too would be an overlong ramble that would not reveal anything new, deep, let alone personal, about its subject.

Mercifully “only” three-hour long that premiered on the streaming service on Wednesday, June 7 Arnold Schwarzenegger -document is mostly just brand polishing.

Arnold-doctor grabs a few negative things from the life of a man known as a 75-year-old bodybuilder, movie star and politician. They will all be skipped without digging deeper than that.

Which premiered on Netflix a couple of weeks ago FUBAR– action comedy trash, Arnold is a promotional video disguised as a docker. It says almost nothing about the real person – at least nothing new.

The archive material of the documentary is of course necessary, although most of it has already been seen before. Schwarzenegger, who acts as the narrator himself, has an unnecessarily large number of acted scenes in the background.

Quite a number of talking heads are marched in front of the camera, whose only function is to pat Schwarzenegger on the shoulder and spit out cheesy exaggerations. “Arska is a unique person who succeeds in everything she wants”.

Got it, thanks.

Over the course of three hours, approximately the same sentence is repeated by numerous different people. He only utters a few crosswords about his colleague Sylvester Stallone.

Schwarzenegger himself praises the United States as the best place in the world until he’s bored.

The USA as a land of endless possibilities fits perfectly into the man’s life story, where everything just happens if you believe in yourself. During the last episode focused on politics, the docker-like thing starts to feel like propaganda, even if it brings up the broken democracy of the United States as one of Arska’s reasons for becoming a politician.

The story that drags the old Schwarzenegger fan still manages to entertain. If you don’t know the man completely, you will hardly get anything out of it.

The funniest episode is called the first one Athlete, although it does feature a war veteran father who raised his son through physical and mental abuse. The Arnold-kuopus disappears from Austria to the world to rack up iron and win bodybuilding competitions as soon as he gets the chance.

Although Schwarzenegger has spoken about the subject many times before, the doc forgets to mention that the father, who suffered from war trauma, was a Nazi. Supervisor Lesley Chilcott does not challenge the interviewee on negative topics at all.

The most entertaining material of the first half contains a lot of clips Pumping Iron from the documentary.

Actor– episode Schwarzenegger says that he didn’t want to be a movie star for the money. He became a millionaire already during his career as a real estate agent. The episode about his acting career does not proceed completely chronologically, but jumps here and there to make the journey to stardom seem very easy for Schwarzenegger. A strong accent is just a little puzzle.

The man emphasizes at every turn that it was just something he wanted to achieve. About talking heads, for example James Cameronilla there is something to say. He says that Schwarzenegger did not want to be an actor at all, but a movie star.

Danny DeVito, Linda Hamilton and Jamie Lee Curtis on the other hand, they speak highly of the man. After all, Stallone, who only appears on the screen a couple of times, says quite frankly that in the 1980s he couldn’t stand Schwarzenegger who was full of himself. The duo and Bruce Willisin the story of the front pictures of the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain is left untold.

The most interesting of the episodes is the one focused on politics American. It shows the most mistakes made by Schwarzenegger, who ended up being the governor of California for eight years.

It is emphasized that the Republican governor wanted to cooperate with the Democrats as well. The decisions that made the life of an ordinary treader difficult are almost swept under the carpet. In his second season, Schwarzenegger made some good changes.

Schwarzenegger’s ex-wife Maria Shriver understandably did not initially want her husband to join politics. Everyone knows that Shriver belongs to the Kennedy clan and JFKwas his uncle.

Schwarzenegger mentions his cheating on his wife, his son who started as a result, and his womanizing scandal. Especially in the last part, the director Chilcott should extract more from his target. Arska acknowledges the convulsions with a two-sentence apology. Or actually just stating that he did something wrong.

The tame approach has opened the doors for the director to Schwarzenegger’s mansions, where animals from donkeys to dogs roam the grounds.

Stara’s round-and-round banter is really entertaining, even if, with the exception of a lot of swear words, it sounds like something from a PR company. Schwarzenegger only gets serious a couple of times, for example when visiting his childhood home and talking about the death of his parents.

The millionaire seems to know how to enjoy his life at the age of 75 by driving around in tanks and giant cars, having fun like a little kid.

However, he says that his whole joke-twisting good guy public image is the same bullshit and role he’s played his whole life. The man uses the German word Schmäh, which I think would translate into a funny trickster instead of bullshit in this context.

At the end, Chilcott highlights Schwarzenegger’s admirably frank comments in recent years regarding, for example, the war in Ukraine, the takeover of the Congress building on January 6, and anti-Semitism.

People change, but by Charles Fleming of 1992 Spy Magazine article is and will remain online. It says that Schwarzenegger once gave people recordings of Hitler’s speeches as gifts.

Even though the series gets to its good side targets far too easily these days, the Arnold documentary’s biggest flaw is still the deadly narcissism structure of the joy of life used by Netflix time and time again. The series is light entertainment and scratching the surface, but it’s difficult to digest even for a die-hard Schwarzenegger fan.