Metal Mush
by Chris Knipp

Seeing as how they are the most famous and popular of heavy metal bands, with ninety million albums sold over the past twenty years, Metallica has not exactly gone unchronicled, uninterviewed, or unfilmed. The 1992 A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica, which covered the making of the huge “Black Album” and the band on tour, included a lot of traumas, a lot of talk, a lot of spine-tingling, brain-damaging music -- and was four numbing -- but compulsively watchable -- hours long.

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, commissioned by the band, which weighs in at a mere two-and-a-half hours, may have set out to be the same kind of thing. It begins with a new, minimal studio set up in the San Francisco Presidio for the group to start recording after a long dry period, and it looks like it's going to be another album-plus-tour documentary.

Metallica is the quintessential primal scream rock band, whose throbbing, doom-ridden songs sound powerful enough on recordings, but played for an audience of a hundred thousand standing and shouting in unison take on the quality of absolutely cosmic throbbing noise. But this aspect of the band is only glimpsed in the new documentary, because it turns out to contain more therapy and less music than any rock doc you've ever seen before. Some Kind of Monster is chiefly valuable for the insights it provides into the zillion-dollar band's tormented but ultimately self-healing group dynamic. The music doesn't seem to matter much any more.

Once the new studio is set up, Danish-born drummer and bandleader Lars Ulrich and lead vocalist and songwriter James Hetfield (the band's founders) are immediately locking horns. As the earlier doc (A Year in the Life) shows, it's not the first time, but at this late stage in their career their creativity seems blocked by the hostilities. A group therapist from Kansas City named Phil is called in, a guy who's previously been hired to reconcile the giant battling egos, we're told, of baseball superstars. The band pays Phil $40,000 a month for his pains. The presence of Phil seems to trigger an awareness in James that he isn't enjoying the band, or his life, any more, and the solution is that he needs to get off the sauce. He disappears and goes into rehab at an “undisclosed location.” Only the lead guitarist, Kirk Hammett, remains in touch with James, who stays away for a solid year. Kirk may be peaceful -- he's usually neutral in the ego clashes of James and Lars -- but he has a sensitive, suffering face and he briefly clashes with the often bossy, irritating Lars over whether or not he can solo.

When James finally returns, the first studio sessions are a brief second honeymoon. A rough period follows, and the doubts about whether this is still a band return. Lars is angry at how James has dominated the band passively by his absence and now in recovery insists on working only from noon to four. But eventually the musicians get back in “the zone” -- though therapist Phil's use of that term is unpopular with the guys. As much as they've relied on him as a shaman and father, they decide to phase him out -- a process he does not adjust to easily. (Who would want to give up $40,000 a week?)

When the album's done, the ever-talkative Lars says “we've proven that you can make aggressive music without negative energy.” The footage contains many cathartic, healing moments among the members. The band had always eschewed tights and stuff like that and just dressed like any band. Now they appear convinced that their music doesn't need inner darkness, drugs or booze to engender macho power. Is that true? The members of Metallica do seem healthier and clearer. James's recovery has been contagious. But flashback clips show that in James's earliest boozer days, with original bassist Burton, the two tall virtuosos with their sweeping hanks of hair had a youthful shock of aggressive energy these forty-somethings couldn't hope to muster -- and neither Lars nor Kirk were ever anything but softies anyway. The darkness, not to mention the immaturity, seems an essential element for heavy metal bands. With James in recovery, it may be no surprise that the "St. Anger" album bombed with critics. But this film doesn't mention that fact. It doesn't mention a lot of things. It's just about what happens in the studio or in public appearances. It covers some painful, revealing moments, but doesn't show anything about the musicians' private lives or the other people they work with and live with, except for a couple glimpses of James's and Lars's cute little kids.

A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica probably told us more about Lars, to a fault, as well as about the recording process. Some Kind of Monster focuses on James Hetfield. But the seamlessly edited new film is just another case of competent documentarians who got a little lucky. It's basically a promo film, and not the masterpiece that some are claiming.

Will Smith (who's yet to be in anything better than Six Degrees of Separation or Ali) and director Alex Proyas (why can't he return to the sublime gothic schlock of The Crow and Dark City?) both deserve better than I, Robot. This movie may provide you with a little bit of fun, but nothing can hide the fact that it's poor genre stuff with slightly upgraded software. Movies are not computers, and we're not robots, though the industry likes to think that. Blade Runner does the trash-futuristic city thing infinitely better (and is not alone in doing so); 2001: A Space Odyssey does the existential angst of artificial intelligence more cosmically, and A.I. does the machine's longing to be human more painfully and humanly. This movie has only a few ideas, watered down from Isaac Asimov, and it tends to belabor them and dumb them down (Akiva Goldman is to thank, or curse, for the final script).

First let us begin with the very emphatic product placements: Converse All Stars, to which a whole scene is devoted, and Audi automobiles. If you're going to chase a running robot through crowded streets, you'll need those All Stars. If you're chased by a gang of mad cybertrons driving huge trucks armed with robotic fork lifts, you'll want to be behind the controls of an Audi -- which cop hero Del Spooner (Smith) drives in a number of demolition derby sequences, one of which almost makes his cyber-prosthetic left arm fall off. Why do the stars of these future flicks wear leather jackets? Maybe those are product placements too. So is FedEx, now delivered by annoyingly obsequious mechanical men.

Will Smith isn't a robot, and the contrast of his awesome pecs with the spindly silver ant-like bodies of the robots, which are blue-eyed to boot, is all too obvious. The pecs are repeatedly shown off in bedroom moments, and then strongly hinted at by the loose pullover Will wears for all his other scenes. He seems to have gotten in character, as Hollywood stars often do nowadays, by going to the gym. There's a dame, an uptight, almost robotic robot shrink, Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) who gets loosened up by her need to bond with Will after the ritual initial sparring.

The movie observes one rather special and arbitrary rule that viewers of A.I. can't but think odd: all robots look alike. I guess that makes the digital effects cheaper, and our sense that the mechanical creatures are an enemy army clearer. Their stick-figure look is pretty boring though. The people of Chicago , where this is supposed to take place, are faceless too. There's a cocky teenage boy who Spoon knows, and Spoon's granny (Adrian Ricard) who bakes him pies. The unkindest cut is that a robot can learn to make them just as tasty. Spoon doesn't have the complication of a wife or girlfriend to deal with any more -- that's a story the movie doesn't get into.

Then there's the genius robot inventor Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), whose apparent suicide Spoon is sent to investigate. Since the inventor is huge -- the company he started is about to put out a robot for every five humans in the country (not the world; in fact we don't see beyond Chicago) and he's the scion of a great company -- and since Spoon is a bit of a wild card, it's odd he'd be sent to investigate. But then, he's Will Smith. Will is a sort of middle class, ghetto-dressed dominant male in this. Not much of a stretch. And he has a human directness and secure sense of himself that makes him shine compared to irritating, self satisfied company CEO Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood, who's thin, always a bad sign -- Spoon's friendly cliché police boss (Chi McBride) is fat -- and the lady shrink (who's got a tight, mannish hairdo; but never fear -- she lets the hair down later and becomes a real woman). And then there's Sunny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), who's sort of R2D2 with (metaphorical) balls and a longing to lead.

Spoon meets the CEO and dislikes him, because while the scientist was a pal, this snake heads a company whose slogan, Spoon thinks, should be “we shit on the little guy.” The robot explosion is represented as a megabucks capitalist enterprise to displace workers and sell hardware, which is tied in with their being treated as a slave class.

That's one of the movie's Asimov-lite ideas. The others concern the nature of the robots. “The Three Rules” (of Robotics) are the essence of robot programming as benign servants of mankind: they're hardwired to be incapable of doing anything harmful to their masters. Spoon -- get this -- distrusts robots because one of them saved his life. (See the movie to find out how that works.) An opening sequence -- the movie starts to creak when you look at how it's put together -- shows how quick Spoon is to assume robots are up to no good. Which of course is justified, and he's the only one to know this, and so it must be or there'd be no plot and no superhero. It all leads to the Spoon punch line to the lady shrink, “Somehow ‘I told you so' just doesn't quite do it.”

The movie has a few moments, such as when Sonny gets interrogated by Spoon to see what's wrong with his program, and a few of the street scenes where robots blend in with people. The big trouble with I, Robot, other than its simplistic, not to say dumb, script, is that, as so often happens nowadays in Hollywood, the ideas and the characters get overwhelmed by the special effects, in this case the armies of digitalized robots, who give Will Smith an opportunity to be an action star (in a void, I guess) but quickly infantilize the proceedings.

I'm not sure if Spoon's motorcycle is a product placement or not, since few people would recognize the custom job that it is, and anyway there are only a few of them available. Maybe Will Smith, who crashed one at 60 mph shooting the movie, also got to keep one as part of his paycheck.

Very wanly recommended, though as one critic has written, if you go, the sequel will be your fault. Maybe better just to go out and buy an Audi, or, if that costs too much, a pair of Converse All Stars.

©2004 Chris Knipp
CineScene