An example of a musical that isn’t all so buoyant, bright and sing-songy, but instead dismal and dark. Yet despite that tone it takes up throughout, and stack on top of that its catatonic main character turned imagined dictator and its helping of nightmarish visions, Pink Floyd: The Wall manages to be an inspired, impressive and oftentimes beautiful work from one symbolic scene to the next, its visuals accompanying the music as much as the music conforms to the visuals, almost like a long-form music video that wouldn’t have the easiest time making it onto MTV.

It was said to have been a labor of discomfort verging on agony for director Alan Parker, cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, and Floyd vocalist and writer of the screenplay Roger Waters to have constructed this movie brick by brick from start to finish. After all, for Waters, it was almost certainly autobiographical in its concepts, and challengingly so; he would have partly pulled in inspiration from his father’s death in the Battle of Anzio before his earliest childhood memories had a chance to form, his own marital issues over the years, the vanishing of bandmate Syd Barrett into extended reclusiveness brought on by a drug-exacerbated mental breakdown, and the alienation with rock stardom and the taller and taller divide he wanted to put up with fans and groupies and the entire lifestyle. Those same points of inspiration must’ve been tapped into for the crafting of the original 1979 album too we have to presume, and so it may have been even tougher for Waters to confront that whole mess of things the second time around.

Even if you’re not sure what to take away from this time-jumping, uniquely British cinematic creation, it’ll be hard to look away from it, and if you’re a fan of Pink Floyd’s music to any extent, you’ll at least keep from covering your ears. 

I myself was never as big on the double album embodiment of The Wall as some. I was always partial to The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals, even The Piper at the Gates of Dawn if we go back to their ‘60s output, but there’s no denying The Wall is a significant achievement with some of the band’s very best songs. Perhaps I’ll appreciate it more than I had having seen this.