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For the most part, concert movies do exactly what they’re supposed to do, showing live footage interspersed with behind the scenes goings-on, and the occasional talking head. That’s how the genre works in the majority of cases, at least, but Metallica decided to come along and say “hold my beer.”
Wildly ambitious by the standard of the medium, the heavy metal giants funneled a substantial amount of their own money in the $32 million ambitious experiment that was Through the Never, only to watch it blow up in their faces when the hybrid of narrative feature and grandstanding showcase of shredding didn’t even manage to recoup its budget from theaters despite a Certified Fresh approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes of 81 percent.
Dane DeHaan stars as a roadie named Trip sent on a mysterious mission to reclaim an item, but for whatever reason he ends up fleeing through the streets being pursued by a mask-clad horseman in a desperate race against time to deliver the precious cargo to Metallica on time on a night ripped right from The Purge. It’s weird, wild, wonderful, and woefully underrated, but also a catastrophic flop in every sense of the world.
Pitched as The Twilight Zone meets Mad Max, it was a hell of a way for the band to enter what’s typically a formulaic arena of cinematic storytelling, with an action-packed and impeccably-orchestrated apocalyptic-esque thriller unfolding at the same time as the standard “play the hits” format.
It still lost a fortune, though, but even after 10 years it’s not a stretch to call it one of the most underappreciated examples of the concert film there’s ever been, as well as perhaps the single most deranged. Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour might shatter all standing records with ease, but it won’t come close to Through the Never‘s ultimately misguided ambition.