The opening minutes of Metallica: Through the Never make it abundantly apparent that this is not a traditional concert film. Immediately looking like a million bucks, the film shows strong cinematic, rather than documentary, qualities as lead character Trip (Chronicle’s Dane DeHaan) is introduced. A roadie for the band, he’s returning to the arena they’re playing as he passes Metallica members in cameos that further distance Through the Never from vérité music docs – horror enthusiast Kirk Hammett dealing with a bleeding guitar, Robert Trujillo doing his ridiculous crab-walk bass-playing in a backstage chamber that shakes the auditorium.
As the camera follows Trip into the arena after this intro, Metallica’s show gets underway, shot with cinematic precision. What follows inside the arena makes up the vast bulk of the film’s running time, as the band run through a career-spanning set atop a crazy stage set that itself recreates its own kind of greatest hits. Incorporating props, visual effects, lasers and pyro in eye-popping fashion, it eventually starts to seem like an enormous 3D version of a backdrop from Guitar Hero – especially when functioning Tesla coils start spewing bolts of lightning.
Interspersed between songs (and thankfully sparing inane stage banter) is an increasingly bizarre mission Trip undertakes across town, bringing him into contact with rioters and pursued by a masked horse-riding assailant, before having some strange special effects-heavy impact on the show itself. Collectively running around the duration of an extended Thriller-like music video, these segments don’t pay off as much as I’d expected – the overall result being a fantastic-looking late-period Metallica concert with a few other “buzzy” moments chucked in.
‘Metallica: Through the Never 3D’ Movie Times
