Saw this last night. Wish I could recommend it, but I can’t, really. Films don’t have to have a message or a mission statement, but they should have a voice or a thrust, if you will – like they were made with intent. That’s not quite the case with UtLTU. It’s as if the filmmakers went to Norway, shot a bunch of footage, and cut it into something they felt resembled a movie. And because there was no voice, no guiding principle, no obvious intent, it felt as though, well, as though I were watching 2 hours of footage about black metal, and nothing more. I didn’t come away enlightened or even entertained.
Some of my issues with the content of the film, in bulleted list fashion.
- Varg is a Nazi. Or a National Socialist. Or whatever the fuck he is this week. Although he’s on the screen for a good quarter of the film, this somehow never comes up. This conspicuous absence feels like apologism on the part of the filmmakers. Maybe it’s not, but they should have at least addressed this in some fashion. In my opinion.
- The only account of Euronymous’ mureder comes from Varg, so there’s no refutation of his version of the story. If you didn’t know anything else about the case, you might think Varg actually acted in self-defense. (He very probably didn’t.)
- Why the hell did they feature a third-rate graffiti artist in this film? Was it only to justify the inclusion of Frost’s tragicomic performance late in the film? Every time they cut to this guy (especially the pointless scene of him in the cab), it broke whatever grymmness they had worked so hard to establish.
- The music – the reason most of us were in the theater – barely warranted a mention. There was almost no discussion of the development of the music, and barely any black metal in the film (although the múm and Sunn(((o))) tracks were nice). Clearly this was a conscious choice on the part of the filmmakers, but why? Unless you are already a trve believer, you’d leave with no sense of how this music came about, or what impact it’s had.
- A lot of black metal dudes are idiots. This isn’t the fault of the filmmakers, of course, it’s just a fact.
That’s all I got for now.
From other reviews (that erred on the side of vague rather than spoiler-y), I gathered that to be what the film was like, and I’m glad I haven’t made the effort to see it.
