Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Good concept, poorly executed.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This isn't a movie. It's a live concert marketed in a quick money grubbing way to screw what is left of their fans who are mostly 14 year old kids taking their allowance money the first few years they are into metallic as guitar hero is obsolete. Everything hateful said about this movie is true and more. After lulu, some kind of monster and so forth I'd be ashamed to say I'm a metallic fan. When we are that age and getting into metal they are great but it's like looking back at cartoons we thought were bad ass when we were kids and now laugh at.real bands have made films and they were successful. The wall, anvils documentary, even spinal tap or mark W... (guy in Ted who smokes pot with the bear) movie rock star which is loosely based on Tim ripper owners joining Judas priest. I mean they could have done a story about how they got famous instead of a crappy MTV/VH1 documentary where Scott Ian of anthrax praises you and a bunch of nobodies/rehashed interviews spliced together. But NOPE lets put a live show on and put some useless dialog in that makes no sense. It could have been a never give up and follow your dreams or be yourself sort of story with some loss like cliff which every idiot will mention and focus on their glory days. But nope, lets put a live show in with recent I can't sing any more , i can't drum, i can't solo and who the heck is on bass abilities from the most over rated band in the world that you are ashamed to say that you were a fan of to people if you are over 20-30.so if I was to shoot a movie about metallic. Focus on how they met, hire some actors, write a script.. you know.. a REAL movie. Get some kids who look like early Dave Mustaine , James, Kirk , Lars and Cliff and talk about Dave's departure. Cliffs death and how they persevered (god a metallic fan using 3 syllable word) and finish with Metallica today and some voice over work or whatever. They set the bar Olympic high with some kind of monster so they could have made anything better without trying but NOPE. Please fire kirk, buy James a shopping cart full of booze, get a drum machine and make them all have a tearful apology for releasing load if people go past the credits that will shut the fans up who hate it and st. anger which aren't mentioned in that atrocity.If "metallic" wanted to rob us of our hard earned money bad enough they should have wore ski masks and robbed us instead of spending a multimillion dollar budget. I hate IMDb spell check for not letting me put the bands name so when you see metallic it is that over rated band only kids listen to

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...

As a Metallica fan for more than twenty years (since I was a young teenager back in 1991) I didn't know what to expect from this METALLICA THROUGH THE NEVER. I heard a few little things about it but nothing too specific because I wanted to go see it with a fresh mind, without any previous ideas. That said and by what I've seen I think it's mainly a concert with a parallel plot that it is in fact a bit confusing and unclear. I don't know if it was just a hallucination (since he took some pills in the beginning, before he went to his mission) or not but the guy dies and rises again like an immortal! In fact it really seems to be just an amount of stuck scenes to illustrate the songs which were being played in the concert, more than a solid and coherent plot. But if it was the case I think better "scenes" should have been chosen to "illustrate" the songs, exception made just for two or three, like "Fuel" or "Ride the lightning". Nice FX were used though and technically the scenes are well done, I just feel that if we separate the "concert" and the "movie" this last one would be very short, incoherent and almost with no sense… So I think this feature is essentially (and essential!) for Metallica fans as it is mainly a concert, and as a live performance I think it was great! I also did appreciate the final credits when the play "Orion" all dressed in black. I quickly understood it was some kind of memorial, but unlike I initially thought it wasn't dedicated to Cliff Burton but to Mark Fisher instead (famous stage architect who died last year). As a "concert" I would score it straightest to the top but as a "movie" I don't score it more than 7/10.