I saw on Engadget that there is a new movie called ‘Rule Breakers’ being released in theaters on March 7th based on Afghanistan’s first girls’ robotic team, FRC team 7329 (The Afghan Dreamers).
Rule Breakers is based on the true story of The Afghan Girls Robotics Team, who grabbed the world’s attention when they were denied member visas by the United States in 2017 while attempting to compete at the First Global Challenge international robotics competition. Fifty three members of Congress signed a petition and President Donald Trump intervened to give the girls travel documents on special humanitarian grounds allowing them to enter the US and compete in the robotics games, according to a New York Times profile.
Sounds interesting, although I’m not confident in the movie’s factual accuracy if this picture of 20 people crammed behind an alliance wall with flags affixed to it is any indication…
I’m not super worried about a movie worrying about the details of the FRC game manual. Our FTC robots appeared in an episode of a TV show this year, and the robots were definitely illegal, didn’t match the field we provided, and the field was set up wrong. Still communicated the same idea
Sure, but the 3v3 structure isn’t a “detail” as much as a fundamental part of the competition - this information is one of the first things mentioned in each year’s reveal and you can see that and the number of team members behind the glass less than 15 seconds into 2022’s game animation. Hopefully, the story of the team getting to the competition is researched better even if the filmmakers didn’t get what happened there quite right.
S14E17 of Blue Bloods. Quick screen grab here and here. I’ve never watched the show, but I drove some robots and spare parts up to NYC for the day. You can see a clearly unusable FTC field set up and some robots that… look robot shaped.
I saw this earlier as well, and while I’m excited to see the film, I am a little worried about the studio behind it and their ability to showcase FIRST.
I think this will be a great movie about the team and situation, but probably won’t be the best movie about FIRST.
Sorry, mate, but I don’t agree–I’ve got far-back experience/observation here.
3v3 is NOT a fundamental part of FRC competition. Even XvX isn’t fundamental, and XvX from opposite ends of the field even less so. For years it was 1v1v1, or similar setups. Once it became obvious those were actually 2v1, 2v2 was introduced in 1999 (long story, covered elsewhere). HOWEVER, for one of the 2v2 seasons (2000) , and one other season, all four teams were on one end of the field. This was thought to assist with field setup times (as the 4 teams for the next match could set up their consoles during the ongoing match), but was abandoned after those seasons. That OTHER season (2001) was 4v0, all teams on one end of the field. I want to say that 2002 also had 4 stations per end, but only 2 were occupied. By 2003 that part had gone away; definitely by 2004 it was down to only enough for competing teams without setup.
Per season? Yeah, the number of teams on the field is important. But it being 3v3 is not. Could be 4v4 next year, could be 2v2 and half-length matches. One of the reasons it’s always first in the reveal is the chance it’s NOT 3v3–a throwback to the days when you weren’t really sure. (In late 2004/early 2005, the Great Car Nack infamously predicted that 3v3 wouldn’t happen… and was promptly 0-1 as he ruefully acknowledged shortly afterwards.)
With that said: It looks like they’re focusing as much on FGC as on FRC, as far as the competition goes. FGC has a different rulebook, which I’m much less familiar with; it’s possible that they put FGC-type alliances on an FRC field, if that makes sense. Or, equally likely, they grabbed an offseason rulebook somehow; wouldn’t surprise me if a random offseason did 4th team in the station instead of one rep from 4th team like they’d usually do. Banners on the field… I could see some misreading of the Event part of the Manual that would cause that to show up; most events with banners on the field put them outside the side rails.
Basically, I could definitely see an “outsider” messing up even key stuff about the event unless they were really focusing on getting it right for the “insiders”.
I’m worried it’s gonna be alot of pats on the back for people who did a nice thing, but not talk about the Team, FIRSTs inclusivity, mission or impact as much and instead focus on the politics/dealing with bureaucracy
My point is that for a movie that is ostensibly non-fiction, there’s a glaring factual error in the trailer. I’m less worried about the representation of FRC competitons as much as the implications for how well-researched the rest of the movie will be.
Flags on the field was a nitpick - I’ll give you that. But something as big as messing up the basic format of a competition in a movie about a team in said competition just doesn’t sit right with me. This information would be easy to glean from even one of the team’s matches, which I would hope they actually looked at before recreating them.
This team deserves to have their story told. I just hope that’s the story they’re going to tell.
As long as you say “inspired by” or “based on” a true story, the facts don’t matter as much as if you say “the true story of”.
Case in point: “Sully” is absolutely notorious in aviation circles for falsely portraying the NTSB. The story is true; the crash and rescue sequence is basically accurate. But the portrayal of the NTSB, according to basically everyone including Sully himself, is very much altered for dramatic purposes (they’re a lot less hostile than the movie shows, to put it mildly).
There are other cases like this, I just picked the one that popped to my head first.
And that’s true, but it’s also not wrong to wish that they would remain closer to the core facts as they embellish other minor details. Does it matter what color tie the senator was wearing when they stood up for the team? Probably not, but their name or what state they represent is a bit more important.
Am I gonna be upset if they didn’t use real match footage (because maybe it wasn’t filmed at the time?) not at all, but if they are gonna talk about a FGC game in a specific year why not actually make one field of that game or even a half field and get creative with the filming angles. There’s a minimum bar of how much the inspired by goes before it suddenly isn’t really what happened or even close anymore. FGC is also minimal compared to FRC due to the goals of that league. The game also hits close to home about solving a problem the teams deal with sometimes on a daily basis.
I’m not super versed on each years FGC game but Afghan All-girls Robotics Team Impressed by 'Friendly' US talks a bit about it and I think that specific game should be brought up and the inspiration of the team to want to tackle this challenge and how it applies to them at home.
This year’s competition was related to a practical problem that threatens more than a billion people worldwide: inadequate access to clean, drinkable water.
The task of the robots was to pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposit the blue balls, which represent water, and the orange balls, which represent pollutants, into different locations. The teams play in groups of three nations, with two groups competing head to head. The three-robot alliance that scores the most points in a game wins.
The field and game objects seem pretty easy to replicate on a small film budget. Why not just get this right and have a level of realism?
To the folks complaining about the competition specifics….this is normal for movies. Hollywood almost never gets the details right. And the blast radius of this film is far greater than the sum total of the people who recognize the inaccuracies.
Ultimately those specifics don’t matter… what matters is the story of these young women, and the challenges that women like them still face today.
I believe they formally registered with an address in Ontario with the intent to share space with another team while competing in the country. I imagine FIRST didn’t put them under too much scrutiny given the notability of the team’s situation.
I volunteered at the FGC events where they attended, but not at the FRC ones. I believe a team from Canada hosted them. The movie preview looks good. They have an amazing story, but I won’t spoil the movie. I plan to see it.
