Contentar
Best movie of this year hands down!
Spoonatects
Am i the only one who thinks........Average?
Taha Avalos
The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
joachimt
This is not a movie, its a concert and for someone who is not all that familiar with Metallica this is not a good introduction to the band, it is actually painful to follow the movie. During the first 30 minutes I was praying that the movie would actually start following the protagonist. The concert takes up far too much space in the movie. It is honestly such a shame that the directors and writers couldn't let the band take the "backseat" for once by just featuring the music and protagonist for majority of the movie. There is nothing wrong with the music in the movie, the concert couldn't be more boring to watch. This movie was actually a huge let down seeing as I was looking forward to following the story of the young roadie Trip into his surreal adventure. Instead we just get a glimpse into his adventure because the concert takes up majority of the plot. The cinematography is beautiful especially when following Trip, which once again makes it such a shame the movie doesn't follow him.
suite92
This is a two-layered film. There is the live action concert footage, then there is a fictional layer about Trip the roadie.The camera work was crisply shot with excellent equipment and was brilliantly edited. The sound was seamlessly joined to it.Some of the most powerful moments for me were when the thousands of audience members sang the choruses in unison, while the band listened and encouraged. I wished I had been there.-----Scores-----Cinematography: 10/10 Inventive and of professional quality; excellent camera crew and film editing.Sound: 10/10 The sound quality and editing were great.Acting: 7/10 Loved the live action concert performances. James Hetfield is quite the showman. The icing from the Trip video did not add anything. Fortunately, the sound editing moved across those parts without a hitch.Screenplay: 7/10 Fortunately, the live action concert footage was dominant. I liked the lasers and pyrotechnics, plus the way the props crew constructed huge pieces while the band continued. The so-so fictional sub-plot about the roadie, Trip, was less interesting.
JaydoDre
I have never seen a concert film before. After watching Through the Never I am not sure whether that statement remains true or not. I have seen snippets of what concerts videos are like and it seems like they are usually just that: videos of concerts shot from different angles. Perhaps a lazy overlay is thrown in every now and then but that's it. Through the Never on the other hand combines an awesome stage performance with a movie, like one very long awesome music video. I think Michael Jackson's Thriller lost its trophy for...whatever that was.Even when it came to the scenes of the concert itself I was not sure how much of it was real. Wiki says that Through the Never uses concert footage from a set of concerts Metallica held in Vancouver. If so, those concerts must have been the most amazing ever. The stage and light effects are breathtakingly good.The use of special effects was especially nice. They were not overused; there was just enough for a few cool scenes. Even though this is a concert film, I feel like this is the amount and quality of special effects that should be used in mainstream movies. Someone from Hollywood should be taking notes.The sound was particularly good. A live recording is often just a washed out incoherent version of the studio recording, but just like in their S&M album, the "live" music in Through the Never is of great quality and the heavy bass of the distorted guitars is Godly. Don't know if that means the music was simply recorded in a studio and then adapted to the stage video and frankly do not care - it's really good.Sadly, no new songs. I am not such a Metallica aficionado that I know their every song, but everything sounded familiar.
Trevor Mcinsley
On paper the plot synopsis for this film sounded brilliant. At least the plot synopsis that I heard of it. A lone roadie facing some kind of over the top apocalypse with the soundtrack provided by Metallica. On a scale of 1 to awesome that is Godzilla fighting a flaming King Kong.Unfortunately the direction just doesn't really take this to heart and the result is simply an hour and a half of Metallica performing with interspersed scenes of the actual plot. It's a shame really because where they overlay the music onto the roadie's story the result is absolutely brilliant. Cutting between the riots and the crowd with Cyanide playing is perhaps the best part of the whole film. The intro to And Justice For All whilst he walks beneath the hanging bodies is good as are the scenes cut into Master of Puppets.The problem is that this underlying plot really should occupy more of the film. Most of it frankly. I mean it doesn't even really appear for the first forty minutes. The music should provide a backdrop for these apocalyptic scenes the whole way through. Instead the roadie's scenes mostly just appear between the songs or during intros and outros. The result is that I was continually left thinking 'when are we going to get back to the plot?' and wanting songs to end just so I could find out what was going on in the actual story.This is completely the wrong attitude as the music itself is fantastic. I listen to Metallica all the time and I've seen them live a few times however I really never watch 'Live' DVDs as I generally find them boring. The stage show and the atmosphere of a live performance just cannot be captured on film.The film only really comes into its own in the last half hour when the plot and the show come together properly. The problem is that when this happens it isn't especially clear what the plot is, what's going on or why. There are some pretty epic visuals running alongside the music but it just doesn't make much sense. Yes setting fire to yourself and running into a crowd with flailing fists looks awesome but logically chucking the burning petrol at them is probably more sensible.Given that the main character is apparently named 'Trip' and he is seen taking a pill towards the start of the film the logical conclusion is that everything that happened, happened in his mind. The film doesn't elaborate on this at the end... in fact it just doesn't really have an ending. It just sort of stops. The problem with using a 'trip' as the basis for a plot is that the viewer cannot really invest in anything that is happening. In terms of narrative it is along the lines of ending a story with 'and then I woke up'; when the reader discovers that the last three hundred pages didn't actually happen they can feel cheated.I had imagined that this was going to be something along the lines of 28 Days Later accompanied by an hour and a half of metal. In reality it's an hour and a half of metal accompanied by maybe ten minutes of weird cinematics devoid of plot, reason or explanation. The synopsis I heard from a friend evidently was wrong and I cannot blame the film for that. However the notion of an apocalypse taking place whilst the concert goers were completely unaware seemed truly fantastic. That's the film I'd like to see.Instead of making a strong film which might appeal to a wide market and introduce Metallica's music to a new audience it is a film that only Metallica fans would sit through. When the credits rolled and the band members were listed as the writers, producers, directors and so on... Dethklok's 'Blood Ocean' came to mind...
