ONE DIMENSION, NO DIRECTION
New film on the British boy band shows their shallow side
These things are such generic exercises at this point that it’s hard to tell the difference between the Justin Bieber and the Katy Perry and the Britney Spears movies.
They seem to come out of a cereal box painted in flat, primary colours with a great, big explosive prize lurking somewhere between the flakes of fake oats and marshmallow emotions.
From a purely practical standpoint, they are 3D concert movies aimed at capturing the live experience of the world’s favourite teenoriented acts.
If you take a benevolent perspective, these movies represent access and a way of democratizing the fan experience. After all, a ticket to the actual event could cost more than $100, but a movie stub is only going to set you back about one-tenth of that sum, ensuring as many screaming girls as possible get a chance to drink in their favourite crush slush.
And for what it’s worth, these films do deliver a close approximation of the live show thanks to the stereoscopic technology and first-row film crews flying over and across the stage in special rigs designed to give the subjects as much divine energy as possible.
Yet, for all the generators of electricity plugged into the creation of One Direction: This Is Us, there’s something missing in this monster of a movie, and it’s a sense of true soul.
That is not to say the five lads — Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson — don’t feel like real people. They are clearly real people with real hearts and minds and plenty of real, plush, finely coiffed hair.
The band, however, is the creation of Simon Cowell — a man whose eerie presence looms over this sugar-coated spectacle like the shadow of Dr. Frankenstein.
In the opening scenes of this movie that chronicles their first live tour, we learn about how the band was born: All five kids were contestants on the U.K. version of The X Factor but failed to make the cut as solo artists — which is almost impossible to understand given their looks and talent.
Miraculously, all five were encouraged to form a boy band and compete as a group. They did, and they won. Within weeks, One Direction was a brand-new boy band with a TV-propelled image suggesting wholesome, happy and largely asexual fun.
Soon, they conquered the world with their saccharine pop single That’s What Makes You Beautiful, and the rest is now standard pop history because like their competitors in the ever-fickle teen market, One Direction is a commodity more than a band.
These five guys were never best friends, cried over heartbreak or got drunk together before sharing their lives on a tour bus. They were the creation of savvy producers and promoters who saw their blue-eyed soul and decided to exploit their drive for personal fame.
All of this could have made This Is Us a very interesting study in the mechanics of modern music-making, especially with loudmouth documentary director Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) behind the camera.
Yet, Spurlock’s signature snark is hard to find in this mess of contrived cuteness and live performance.
The closest we get to anything remotely “documentary” is a scene showing us the boys being awoken in the middle of the night to record sections of the new record, one at a time.
As they stand in a hotel room in their underpants, wiping sleep from their tired eyes in the wee hours of the morning, we watch them record tracks surrounded by mattresses doubling as acoustic baffles. The producer needed a few specific pieces he could later assemble into a new pop track, and the boys provide the raw materials.
At one point, it’s impossible to shake the impression that these five must-be millionaires are the modern equivalent of child miners, slaving away in the shafts, hauling out the coal that will later be turned into industry gold.
They do not own themselves. And they clearly have no power over their own lives.
When we visit each of their hometowns and meet their respective families, we learn they haven’t been home since X Factor started. Contractually obligated to sing, dance and charm the masses into dewyeyed catatonia, the boys are on a closed train that has only One Direction — and it’s straight to the bank.
You can smell the money wafting off the screen, and you can sense Dr. Frankenstein in his black T-shirt pacing in the background.
These movies are designed to give the fans a peek inside the minds of their heroes, and a hint of personal connection. This Is Us captures nothing more than the desired optics, which makes it a great commercial for One Direction but a rather tedious documentary, despite the eye-popping spectacle and flawlessly styled tresses.