If holiday spending has a gotten a little out of hand, don’t worry: You don’t need to spend $10 on “We Are Marshall.”

Now don’t be misled – it’s not a bad film. In fact, it’s pretty good. But you already know what’s going to happen and – more importantly – how it’s going to happen. You could have written the script, could have edited it together, could have cued up the orchestra all on your own.

And therein lays this critic’s confusion. How is one to fairly judge a movie like “We Are Marshall?”

It’s the same question many critics asked of “United 93” and “World Trade Center,” and it’s a question that’s not easily answered. As someone who most enjoys surrealism, or fictionalized dramas, at the movies, these straightforward, reality-based historical recreates are difficult – if not impossible – to judge.

The goals, after all, of such films are to replicate reality – to strip a movie of its style and its flourishes and to carefully bring life a fact sheet culled from a historical event.

History is not judged as good or bad, though, so how can a movie so firmly based around a historical event be evaluated along that criteria? If someone died, and others mourned, and then a movie was made about that death and about that mourning, how can someone deem that film as good art or bad art? It’s what happened - period.

And so is the case with “We Are Marshall,” a taut, formulaic, crisply told recreation of the airplane crash that killed the Marshall University football team in 1970. It’s a moving film, but mostly because it’s an unmistakably moving – equally heartbreaking and inspiring – bit of American history. And director McG, for his part, does his best to get out of the way and allow the drama of reality to speak for itself.

Like clockwork, the plot hits its required plateaus to advance the drama. We start on the sidelines, watching a close football game coming down to the wire. About 10 minutes in, that team has boarded a plane which crashes over West Virginia. An assistant coach, who at the last second offers up his seat to a colleague, hears a report of the crash on the radio at a gas station.

Ten minutes later, we’re at the funeral, looking in at a town overwhelmed with grief. And after that, the University’s president (David Strathairn) finds his way to the home of Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey), a devoted family man and small-school football devotee who offers to fill the position no one else wants: Marshall’s new head football coach.

As Lengyel hopelessly struggles to put together a new team, he has a breakthrough when the NCAA agrees to allow him to play freshman. And as the team slowly comes together, defying the critics who would prefer Marshall give football a break, they find a way not only to emerge from death’s shadow but also to win.

There’s genuine emotion in this movie, and wide-ranging ones at that. There’s the shock of loss, the struggle in moving forward, the fear of failure and the joy of putting one’s passion into a good cause, regardless of the results.

Did it require any artistry to achieve this effect?

Is it any indication of skill to elicit emotions from an audience about real people who died a shocking, tragic death?

Those are questions that loom over films like this. But still, there’s something to be said for taking time to remember, and for bringing to life all sides of a story that history has come to simplify.

“We Are Marshall” is little more than an act of remembrance. But in an age where things are forgotten almost by the hour, maybe that’s enough – to bring us together for two hours; to ensure the memory lives on.

by: Steven Snyder steven@zertinet.com, Published 2006-12-21