Metallica: Through the Never (2013)

Overrated and overhyped

Fantastic!

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

So Iv'e been a fan of Metallica for a couple years now and at one point was my favourite band. I went into this film expecting it to be a film, but it wasn't. This DVD is just 90% concert footage with 10% footage of the guy from chronicle wondering round the streets on the night of the Purge. It has a WTF ending that doesn't make sense and will leave you unsatisfied. My biggest problem is that it is essentially a live DVD of Metallica. The problem with that is Metallica are no good live as James cant sing anymore Kirk has always been s**t live making amateur mistakes every chance he gets and theirs never been anything impressive about Lars Ulrich's drumming. Metallica is more of a studio band than a live band so I don't know why they made this. Next time you set out to make a film Metallica make a fu****g film yeah!!!

my friends i have trekked through the IMDb login nonsense to give only my 2nd review on IMDb. only when are things really bad do i go through this ***.i am ashamed to have seen this group in concert twice. it was in 1989 and in 1990 and i thought at the time they were awesome. they played for 2 hours and i banged my head off - despite my quite short hair....its OK to keep cracking it out but years follows and then 'some kind of monster'then thisLars - you bald f***kirk - you are *** for not following JasonHatfield - you are scum for not following cliffother guy - whateveri really hate metabolic because i gave them about $300 bucks in my life - i'll download it all just to screw them but its all so *** they are safe.Awful . My first one star review.The crowd in this are the most bored you will ever see at any concert EVERha ha - the IMDb robot made me change my word to metabolic - they are that ***& - ha ha

This movie made me want to set myself on fire and run flailing into an angry mob of baseball equipped, bike-less bikers.I just waded through a sea of reviews praising this 'masterpiece' and time after time was brought to tears with laughter. This isn't a movie! It may have been a good concert if Lars was replaced with the phonics monkey from South Park and James started drinking again. The timing in all the songs were so interchangeable that one would think it was a documented case of rhythm perceived by a person with half a brain. The concert was not one of their greatest and I get that not every concert is going to be great but this was the one they put their stupid movie to. Well... Maybe calling it a movie is a bit too much. I've read in reviews that people shouldn't bad-mouth it for it's content and watch it like you would a concert... No. Watch a concert like you would a concert. They released this as a movie, with a movie trailer and everything, then they lazily put badly written scenes from a story with absolutely no direction in between songs. Yeah I'm done writing this sh!tty review. The movie was sh!t but it was at least hilarious. Download it, watch it, laugh or cry. Warm gooey pen!s butter in your eye.

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...