When the music dies down and all of the strange imagery calms itself down, the film, of course, gets really quiet and meditative, and by extension, slow, occasionally to the point of being just plain dull, and certainly to the point of feeling a bit pretentious, or at least more so than usual, as the film, while not arrogant, boasts a certain degree of consistent self-congradulation. The film is generally committed to its interpretive themes and isn't quite as gimmicky as its concept makes it sound, yet it's hard to pretty much literally make an album into a film without getting gimmicky, let alone when that adaptation is riddled with stylish imagery, and with all of the film's good intentions of artistry, subtlety and depth will lapse, thus leaving this film to occasionally plummet into being not much more than an hour-and-a-half-long advertizement for a then-almost-three-year-old album, which I suppose I don't mind too much, partially because when this film goes back to avant-garde artistry, it gets to be too much of that for its own good. The film isn't monotonous, yet its defining style and, to a certain degree, "plot" do begin to run in circles on more than a few occasions and lose steam, and by extension, their meaning, a problem exacerbated by the film's focus getting to be a bit hazed, as it will sometimes find itself focusing too much on metaphorical style than story, and will sometimes even find itself focusing too much on the gimmick of the style, rather its substance.
It's an interesting concept, and certainly a daringly unique one, yet one that's bound to run into faults along the way and, sure enough, does, as the film's structure gets to be distancingly convoluted, or at least for a little while, because as repetitious as this film is, you're bound to figure out where it's going after a while.
To break down "The Wall" for you kids out there, it's a darkly surreal art piece that meditates just as much, if not more on metaphorical imagery than it does on the almost obligatory "plot", which chronicles, in a non-linear fashion, the lonely youth and adulthood of fictional rockstar Pink through scarce dialogue, but instead, interpretive visuals and music from Pink Floyd's album "The Wall". or acid, this product gets to be a bit too trippy for its own good. It certainly makes for a better song than a movie, for although this film is enjoyable and worth a whirl, especially if you're a fan of Pink Floyd. Wow, I'm wishing I was comfortably numb right now, because saying that hurt a little bit, and the Waters-Morrison cover isn't even that bad, it's just that it's not, you know, Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb", though as I said, not a whole lot of songs are. Eh, whatever, the song's still a masterpiece of awe-inspiring proportions, because, man, few people can rock like Pink Floyd rocked with "Comfortably Numb" not even Pink Floyd could rock like that again, as Roger Waters definately proved when he tried again in 1990, only with Van Morrison instead of David Gilmour.
Okay, all of this dark sarcasm in the classroom aside, I'm not necessarily recommending that you do acid, but if you're going to stop Skittling around and really taste the rainbow, then you might want to be careful with your Pink Floyd song selection, just in case of a bad trip, because when you look at the lyrics to "Comfortably Numb", they can be either really neatly trippy with their obvious drug references or a little bit depressing. Seriously though, Alan Parker isn't the chipperist Jones out there, so of course he's perfect to direct something as bleak as a partially animated showcase of Pink Floyd music that stars the guy from the darkly depressing, hardcore heartbreaker of a rock band that was The Boomtown Rats. This film is certainly less optimistic than "Tommy", and really, I'm pretty surprised, seeing as how we're talking about Alan Parker, who, by 1982, already had such delightfully heartwarming classics under his belt as "Midnight Express" and "Shoot the Moon", and after this film, he continued to make such other uplifting fluff pieces as "Birdy" and, of course, the most optimistic of them all, "Angela's Ashes". It's "Tommy 2: Still Gotta Be On Drugs to Get It", only it has less cheesiness, more bleakness and, somehow, less plot than "Tommy".
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