H.R. Giger Revealed

How do you make a documentary about a person who desperately wants to be very secretive about himself? Well you bring few people, mostly artists, to speak how great artist Giger is and how he will no doubt be worshiped in a future as an overlooked genius. The lowest point of documentary was when they brought astrologist to talk how special Giger is because of planet alignment that took place on the date of his birth. While all the time Giger himself is lurking in the background as some sort of shadow so in the end you get a movie that looks like TV commercial for one of those a new age preachers.

Which is a real shame because Giger seems to be an interesting person who made an impact in popular culture especially in the movies and video games. So it would of been really interesting if they actually talked to Giger himself about his background, his life and numerous movie projects he was involved of which many failed to be made like Coppola's produced SF movie "Tourist" or the "Dune". And I don't see why they didn't do that because from his cult book "Necronomicon" he doesn't seem to be so secretive since he shares some old photos of his childhood and earlier years with captions, but only if you understand German.

I guess this movie can only be interesting to Giger himself when he feels murky he just pops it in his DVD player and watches this self-indulgent rant-a-thon.

This documentary was awful, it was boring, contained no information about Giger or his working methods and showed nothing of his life or inspirations. The entire film seemed to be made up of fan interviews each explaining why Giger is a genius but showing very little proof of the claims, Gigers work was shown only in short clips and the man himself appears for no more than 5 minutes of the film. Like many people my main knowledge of Gigers work is from the Alien films so I was hoping this documentary would expand and broaden my knowledge of his work and influences but sadly this wasn't the case, save your time and money and buy a book of the mans work instead.

First of all the technical qualities of this production are laughable at best. It's so tragic I cannot believe this made it onto a DVD at all. The videography is extremely shaky, with really poor angles and compositions. The image quality on the segments they've actually shot themselves were most likely done with a 200 USD consumer camera. The audio is also VERY poor, and some parts actually have inaudible dialogue. The editing is pure mayhem and is very unstructured. There is digital zooming and panning and whatnot. The only thing missing are the default transitions like wipe, mosaic and so on to make this home video complete.

The contents are composed of a couple of random segments with HR Giger himself talking about how he burned his dinner in the oven, and then a zillion headshots of random know-it-all-people praising HR Giger's work up and down. There's no information about HR Giger's history or background, no information about where he gets his inspiration from, or how he produces his work. There's really nothing in this "documentary" about HR Giger himself. There's just a bunch of people talking about their own feelings for his work. Oh and let's not forget the fantastic segment with the astrology dude spilling his guts about HR Gigers charts. LOL.

No, this is a waste of time. For me. And for you.

It is not informative, nor is it in-depth or unique as the title would suggest. Being a fan of Giger's work, I was deeply disappointed with this so-called documentary. I'm not sure who this film would appeal to as there's no new information that most wouldn't already know, and there's not enough information for it to appeal to artists just being introduced to his work. The whole thing plays out like an amateur fan-made film with bits and pieces of ideas, in no particular order, set to a questionable soundtrack with brief commentary from fans and other artists. There's no real insight, and the whole thing plays out like a sloppy circle-jerk. The run time is a little less than an hour, in which I almost fell asleep multiple times. If you want to know more about HR Giger, read one of the books about him. If you don't have the time, doing a simple Google search would yield better results than this uninspired rubbish of a documentary.