Metacritic reviews

With "Gravity" around the corner, Metallica Through the Never isn't the year's most groundbreaking achievement, but it's surely the most earth-shattering, and that's enough to make it one helluva comeback story.

A definitive document for anyone who’s ever hoisted the devil-horn fingers in metalhead solidarity.

Maybe because the band enjoyed raves for its daring 2004 psychodrama, Some Kind of Monster, an experimental narrative is shoehorned in, involving a roadie (Dane DeHaan) doing bloody battle in a deserted city. Your heart sinks with every cutaway.

However mindless and heartless it may be, Through the Never succeeds as pure sense-swamping spectacle. It is a blow-out banquet for Metallica fans, and a blockbuster rock-and-rollercoaster ride for any heavy metal tourists curious to see this music played at major-league level.

This is a movie made for people who mash themselves up against those steel crowd-control barriers at concerts and still don't think they're close enough.

It makes for a unique sort of concert film, but also a weaker one. It would have been better if it had dispensed with the frail narrative or else committed to being completely bananas. But as die-hard Metallica fans well know, a little buffoonery is worth weathering for the main attraction.

The Song Remains the Same. There, said it – as will every other rock & roll fanatic considering Metallica: Through the Never.

This stereoscopic IMAX vanity project presents the titular rockers not as men, but as living legends, playing the hits at a gigantic venue, for thousands of bellowing diehard fans. In place of introspection, there is only lionizing spectacle; if Monster laid bare the wounded egos of metal’s biggest stars, Never simply re-inflates them.

Since the movie’s street side dream doesn’t add much more than a gimmicky “interpretation” of their sound, you’re left with a deafening dirge –well-played, but really, no improvement on your basic concert film.

The songs still sound great here, but the instruments aren't amplified nearly as much as the nostalgia and vanity of the men who wield them.