REVIEW: ‘Boom! Boom! The World Vs. Boris Becker’

In the 1980s, Boris Becker turned heads by not only being the first German to win Wimbledon, but also being the youngest person to do it at the age of 17. While the rising star still had many victories in store for him, it wouldn’t all be smooth sailing. Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker is a two-part documentary that takes a look at the tennis great’s life to date, its triumphs and its failings.

As someone who has never kept up with tennis, I had never heard the name Boris Becker before picking up Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker for review. But with the opening, seeing Becker awaiting sentencing and the show promising to explore how Becker had managed to go from being at the top of his sport to facing jail time, I expected a roller coaster tale of ups and downs. While Becker’s tale is certainly filled with successes and a few significant failures, I found the presentation to be far more level than I had expected. I think this is largely due to how hands-off the production takes most of the content it explores.

Rather than telling a scripted story through heavy narration with moments punctuated by eyewitness accounts by Becker and others, Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker flips the process and leaves almost all of the storytelling to the individuals who were there. Only minimal questions are even asked of the witnesses, leaving them to tell the story they know in a way that doesn’t feel guided or manipulated. With only moments of meaningful clarifying elements told to the viewer, the production largely sits back and lets you decide what you will ultimately think of Becker’s life.

How Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker approaches the events of Becker’s life oscillates between overly complicated and elegant in execution. Rather than following the star’s life chronologically, the mini-series jumps around between time periods as the individual subjects they are discussing warrant. While this can be dizzying at times, generally, it helps the threads of the man’s life develop cleanly, before ultimately coming together, as the series wraps up with the star’s challenges in the near-present day.

I also appreciated the production’s decision to not dramatize any moments for which there isn’t original footage. It often feels like dramatization moments are when documentaries are most prone to show bias as the newly made presentations of events cannot help but lean the perspective of the moments one way or the other. Keeping away from such elements helps maintain the show’s feeling of neutrality.

Ultimately, Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker succeeds at the most fundamental aspect that is supposed to sit at the core of a documentary, it sets out to present the viewer with the facts, as near as can be determined, through the sources closest to the events it investigates. How the viewer feels after gaining this knowledge is up to them.

Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker is streaming now on AppleTV+.