Metallica Through the Never Reviews
Top CriticEven as someone who finds Metallica's music silly (ditto the movie's incoherent apocalyptic fantasy sequences), I was floored by much of the visual imagination.
It's all very appropriately overblown, and director Antal gives the fireworks as much attention as he does each performer.
Metallica, those thrash virtuosos of doom, get the grand 3-D opera they deserve: a godless-apocalypse-meets-Vegas spectacle, full of fireballs and electric chairs.
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| Original Score: A-
Metallica is as fierce and intense as ever, and the greatest hits set the band performs is a barrage of heavy riff-age that captures the band at its most vital.
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| Original Score: B-
In the real world, concerts build to a climax, then return for two or three more; on the screen, alas, "Metallica: Through the Never" just kind of peters out.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Despite swooping camera movements and elaborate stagecraft, the film produces detachment rather than immediacy.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
The problem is that Antal and Metallica took two different movies - a fine live-band document and a supernatural end-of-days romp - and smashed them together to make both of them more boring.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
An old-school music video stretched to feature length.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Through the Never succeeds as a concert film by serving up enough dazzling visual wizardry and good ol' thrash metal rock to make it a passably engaging experience.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If half an hour of bizarro side-narrative fever dream is the price of admission for a gorgeously lensed, best-seat-in-the-house hour of chugging rock brutality, I'll pay gladly.
Lets viewers feel like they're sliding up and down the fretboard of Kirk Hammett's guitar, volleying between the cymbals of Lars Ulrich and swallowing spit spewed by singer James Hetfield.
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| Original Score: 4/5
This movie is basically "Spinal Tap" minus the jokes.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
The 3-D concert footage is unassailably cool. Less assured is the occasional storyline threaded through the film.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
If you're looking for an orgasmic trip to heavy-metal heaven, this is it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A sweeping, ambitious take on concert films, "Metallica: Through The Never" works well enough visually, and certainly musically, to make up for its feeble attempt to fictionalize the lengths to which a fan would go for his favorite band.
It's a damn fine concert movie and a musical thrill ride. Period.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Arguably, the band has never been as tight as it is with lurking bassist Robert Trujillo; director Nimród Antal knows exactly where to place his roving camera to sop up every double-pedal drum flurry and wailing solo.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The most immersive concert film ever ...
However mindless and heartless it may be, Through the Never succeeds as pure sense-swamping spectacle.
A definitive document for anyone who's ever hoisted the devil-horn fingers in metalhead solidarity.
