ENIGMA

Aaron Rodgers on Netflix is a Wild, Drug-Fueled Woo-Woo Journey

Even in a puff piece vanity project like this new series, the NFL star comes across as a woo-woo weirdo. Whatever image rehab this was supposed to be, it’s a failure.

During his decorated two-decade career, Aaron Rodgers has battled through numerous injuries, the most recent of which was the Achilles tear that occurred four plays into his debut with the New York Jets and cost him the entirety of the 2023-2024 season. Yet it’s his off-field behavior that’s done the real lasting damage to his reputation, be it his promotion of conspiracy theories and hallucinogenic drugs, his squabbles with the media, or his infamously misleading claim about his COVID-19 vaccination status (“I’m immunized”).

The four-time NFL MVP addresses all of that and more in Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, a three-episode docuseries made with the star’s thorough participation. Alas, even with Rodgers speaking candidly about his ups and downs, Gotham Chopra and Liam Hughes’ Netflix profile is an unilluminating vanity project—less a work of investigative journalism than a puff piece designed to rehabilitate his tarnished image.

Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, which premieres Dec. 17, frames its life-story recap with Rodgers’ efforts to bounce back from his devastating Achilles injury (which took place a few months shy of his 40th birthday). With up-close-and-personal access to its subject, the series affords glimpses of the gridiron great’s peerless determination to be the best and, concurrently, to prove his doubters wrong—a focus that’s defined him since his early days as an undersized high school QB, a junior college upstart, and a Cal phenom who dropped precipitously in the 2005 NFL Draft.

Like so many athletic legends, Rodgers can attribute part of his success to the perpetual chips on his shoulder, and those piled up even once he reached the pros and found himself biding his time behind incumbent Green Bay Packers icon Brett Favre, who was in no rush to cede his under-center spot to his future replacement.

Chopra and Hughes’ premiere covers rather straightforward terrain, detailing Rodgers’ rehab at the same time that it revisits his years as a football neophyte, the latter of which is sprinkled with relatively non-specific comments about his upbringing in a devout Christian household. It’s clear that the directors (and Rodgers) hoped that this non-fiction portrait would be a prelude to a real-life 2024-2025 Cinderella Story comeback. That, to put it mildly, has not panned out; rather than returning to the field and leading the Jets to the promised land, a now-healthy Rodgers has largely fizzled in his maiden full season with the team, to the point that many have recently raised the idea of benching him.

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It’s Aaron Rodgers: Enigma’s middle chapter that contains the bulk of its more controversial material, following Rodgers as he travels to Costa Rica for a three-day ayahuasca retreat, during which he does mind-altering drugs, gets in touch with his “feminine” side, and—referring to the temazcal sweat lodge he sits in for hours—states things like, “I think from an esoteric standpoint, it’s putting yourself in the womb of the medicine. The knowledge from the rocks. In that tradition, the rocks hold the wisdom.”

During these passages, Rodgers talks about his “battle for identity”—a war waged between his cocky alpha football side and his sensitive, introspective personal side. Much of this involves using the terms “ego death” and “plant medicine” whenever possible, often in the context of discussing his belief in looking inward to find the peace, happiness, and contentment he craves.

Rodgers’ ambitions in this respect are laudable. His actual New Age verbiage, however, can be trying. To wit: “There’s a concept that I studied where we’re moving our ego to the side to allow our observer to kind of see things clearly, because the ego can confuse things, muddle things, to try and make ourselves feel better. But the observer can be an objective viewer of your life.” He continues, “I want to be friends between observer and ego. And so I think we need a death of the ego, because the ego needs to be like the phoenix and rise from the ashes, and take on a new form, which hopefully is way more in conjunction with the observer. So you’re not strictly living life through your ego.”

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Aaron Rodgers: Enigma is full of such wisdom, sometimes accompanied by footage of him dancing, hugging, and getting his face painted in Costa Rica. Assuming Rodgers’ perspective, Chopra and Hughes paint all of this as a little bit out there, sure, but mostly as part of an earnest and harmless process of self-discovery. The same tack is taken when it comes to Rodgers’ conspiratorial ideas (which are only addressed when he shrugs off accusations that he was a Sandy Hook denier), his firestorm-producing COVID vaccination assertion, and his support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who offered Rodgers the VP slot on his presidential ticket).

At every turn, the series—with Rodgers’ active assistance—downplays and/or sanewashes the quarterback’s unconventional, dubious, and potentially dangerous opinions and actions, even using critical media commentary (heard in audio montages) as context for its revelations about Rodgers’ supposed truth.

There’s no doubt that Rodgers believes everything he’s saying. Yet by refusing to question his attitudes and outlooks, and avoiding digging into the thornier aspects of his tale—such as his estrangement from his family or his tumultuous romantic relationships, which are dealt with as fleetingly as possible—Aaron Rodgers: Enigma serves no purpose except to soften, glorify, and normalize him. The directors include interviews with numerous friends, coaches, and teammates who praise Rodgers for his dedication, work ethic, intelligence, eclecticism, and curiosity, and they draw apt links between his athletic and spiritual quests for an “edge” that will lead to transcendent improvement. What they don’t do, however, is analyze, too busy are they chugging the star’s Kool-Aid.

Aaron Rodgers: Enigma is overstuffed with bro-y self-help platitudes about finding harmony between the internal and external, and about how winning isn’t everything, regardless of sports’ typical “binary representation” of success and failure—the latter of which is used to turn his crushing playoff defeats into positive learning-experience moments.

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Throughout, Rodgers espouses the idea that he’s on a journey to understand the complexities of himself and life, as opposed to the black-and-white viewpoints espoused by his parents and their religion. Chopra and Hughes’ series, though, is so in the tank for Rodgers and the way he sees the world that it proves as one-note and limited as the things the New York Jets quarterback purportedly decries.

Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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