Pink Floyd - The Wall

This cinematic adaptation of Roger Waters' autobiographical stage fantasy will delight Pink Floyd devotees who will get off on its intense self-referentiality but will leave very little for anyone not sharing the same mind-set.

Interweaving three narrative threads centred around Pink (Bob Geldof in a part that Waters, who wrote the script, was originally intended to play), a jaded rock star who behind "The Wall" of his alienation on one hand dreams of his childhood, in particular his over-protective mother and his father who he lost during WWII, and on the other, is given to megalomaniacal fantasies of a Hitlerian bent.

With no dialogue as such but rather a combination of Waters' well-known music and Gerald Scarfe's Fantasia-like animation, the film is more like an extended music video than anything that holds any narrative or dramatic interest. In many ways it's a pity Ken Russell didn't direct this as Alan Parker, despite his varied experience with music-oriented films, only manages to gives Waters' opus a fairly literal rendition rather than the kind of operatic excessiveness it deserved.

 

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