Metallica: Through the Never

A concert film and a fiction run at the same time. On stage Metallica plays; meanwhile a young man on the band's crew is sent across town to collect a bag from a stranded truck. In the city the streets have emptied, a riot is under way and a masked rider is roaming. The subject is not the story but the concert. The fictional sections are never explained and resolve into nothing; their function is to supply visual counterpoint between numbers. That choice splits the film in two and for a good part of the audience it stays entirely superfluous. The form puts the real show on stage. The concert was shot in front of a live audience in Vancouver on a purpose-built stage: rising coffins, a toppling statue of Justice, screens catching fire. It was designed for three dimensions and the large format, and the camera moves inside the set. The band paid for the production themselves and said so openly; it did not recover its cost. It has stayed in circulation as a concert record nonetheless. Nimród Antal directs. Dane DeHaan plays the young man in the fiction. Who it is for: Metallica listeners and viewers who like concert films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the fictional strand to mean something; it arrives nowhere and the film does not try to explain it.