Review of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) by Salvador A — 13 Oct 2010

Please pardon this review if it feels biased, but I can't help but express my overwhelming love for this band in the one way I can do it fairly well: A review. Luckily, Pink Floyd (One of few bands to accomplish this) has a fictionalized movie based around one of their albums. "So it's like Tommy?" You may ask. Actually it isn't. It features the story told directly from Floyd's rock opera/concept album: The wall. In a completely unrelated fact, the wall IS my favorite album of all time, but I will try to keep this love of all things Floyd contained in order to make this a fair and unbiased review....

"So, what is The Wall?" You may ask. "Is it anything like Tommy?" The Wall is like tommy like how "Passion Of The Christ" is like "Monty Python's Life Of Brian". They may have a similar theme, and sound alike on paper but in actuality they are very different. Tommy uses The Who's music to directly tell the narrative and uses the lyrics as dialogue. The Wall, however, uses the music as a sort of "Rail" for the plot, guiding it and setting the mood. The music acts more as a story enhancer rather as the actual story.

"So, What is the story" You may ask. "Is it anything like Tommy?" Well no, not at all. The Wall tells the story of "Pink" a rock-star in the late seventies who's life has been filled with "Bricks" building up the metaphorical wall. Pink is played by Bob Geldof, and barley speaks any dialogue throughout the entire film. The character is based off of Pink Floyd's bass guitarist: Roger Waters. In early years, Pink's father is killed overseas in WWII (As was Waters' father). He grew up under the watchful eye of a overprotective mother, and was bashed around and ridiculed in school by harsh teachers. Each of these events in Pink's life are "Bricks" that lead to his eventual isolation from the rest of mankind. When the bricks build up, Pink locks himself in his hotel room, away from the people around him essentially: "Building the wall".

The film is depicted in both live action and animated format, occasionally becoming a VERY dark animated expression of metaphors, such as the bombing of london by iron eagles. These animated segments is where the film really shines, many famous scenes such as the "Marching Hammers" have become famous and were enough to send chills down my spine. The live-action segments, however, were slightly more average, with decent silenced performance from the whole cast (The film has very little to no Dialogue).

The music that drives the movie is expertly timed to enhance the cinematic experience 100X over. Without it, the movie would be a dead mix of cool animation and decent camerawork. But, with the music, the movie really shows what it's trying to be: a tribute to one of the greatest rock bands of all time. And for that, I thank the creators.

Pink Floyd: The wall gets 87 marching hammers, out of 100.

********This review was written by "PULSE", not "Over the Rising Sun"********.