Giannis: The Marvelous Journey (2024)

Giannis: The Marvelous Journey Review

In America, we often forget that the NBA is more than just the bleachers inside the arena. Basketball is a worldwide sport now. Kids in third-world countries are learning about, and have access to knowledge about, guys like LeBron James and Steph Curry.

The Greek Freak has become one of the greatest power forwards to ever play the game, but that’s all he started off as: an NBA star. His story has been skimmed over by media outlets, though it gets deeper with Giannis: The Marvelous Journey.

He was born in Nigeria before his family emigrated to Greece around 2000 with his brothers. Giannis is obviously the main focus of The Marvelous Journey, but it certainly doesn’t take long to figure out that the Antetokounmpos are a strong family who stuck together through everything life threw at them.

Like life itself, you take those scary moments along with those beautiful joyous motivating moments, as they would go to an internet cafe in Athens to watch NBA highlights online. This was years before Web 2.0 happened; bandwidth was atrocious during this time but here is where Giannis found what he was supposed to do.

Directed by Emmy Award-winning ESPN producer Kristen Lappas, this documentary gives us a little bit more of what we’ve already heard about Giannis Antetokounmpo’s story. He went from being a nobody that made noise during the early 2010s which scouts heard including Milwaukee Bucks‘ GMs’.

However, Giannis: The Marvelous Journey stays put because of its themes. The Antetokounmpos look after one another and Giannis is aware that all of it can be taken away from him in a second so he works harder than anyone else. The NBA is a money-making machine with players trying to double up off moguls; some people find that distasteful or intriguing.

Giannis just wants to ball he’s cut from a different cloth. It’s not like there haven’t been plenty of NBA players who grew up poor in America but his perspective on what he needs to do with his success diverges from American-born players. It’s beautiful because we’re starting to see more European players move into the forefront of the NBA.

Watch Giannis: The Marvelous Journey For Free On Gomovies.