Metal Lords Review, A Netflix Coming Of Age To The Beat Of Metal A Funny, Simple And Engaging Story
Starring: Jaeden Martell, Isis Hainsworth, Adrian Greensmith
Director: Peter Sollett
Streaming Platform: Netflix (click to watch)
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three star) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Metal Lords wants to be a thrill, an electric shock in a catalog for teenagers inhabited by traditional love stories, looks full of fear for the judgment of others and heartbeats for the meeting with one’s soul mate, Metal Lords. A rebel song for rebellious souls built around fragile containers, ready to break. The film directed by Peter Sollett thrives on references from the past, film and television legacies recovered with attention, reshuffled and united in a vaguely new recipe, which starts from adolescent anguish to make music first, and then cinema.
The new Netflix original film has nothing new to the appearance. Inside there is all the musical competition coveted by losers in the school field at the School of Rock, there is the passion for music, the deepest and most delicate themes touched by teen-dramas like Dawson’s Creek or Skins, there is the coming of age of John Hughes , in short, there is that universe of young citizens kept in the shadow of school lockers, and ready to find their place on the stage of life.
Metal Lords Review: The Story
For Hunter, a solitary and introverted teenager, that glimmer of light in a world of shadows has nothing corporeal, or visual, at all. It is a sound, that of an electric guitar ready to reverberate and translate into adrenaline and deafening sounds, words and thoughts, fears and insecurities, left deaf in the drawer of the mind. Unable to speak in a world that seems not to listen to him, Hunter plays and he does it flanked by his long-time friend, Kevin, a budding drummer driven more out of the duty of friendship than true passion.
In a school universe dominated by cheerleaders and acclaimed athletes, there is no place for those who wear black, wear long hair and respond to the stereotype of the “different”, of the “strange”, only because they love a genre like heavy metal. Prejudice at Glenwoon Lake High School therefore turns into a monster to be defeated; a titanic challenge always carried out to the rhythm of music and with the strength of passion on the stage of the Battle of the Bands, a competition for musical groups organized by their high school. There is only one obstacle to achieving the eternal glory that Hunter and Kevin aspire to: their band (Skullf *cker) is missing someone to play bass. The search for the new band member takes a sudden turn when Kevin meets Emily (Isis Hainsworth), talented cellist with frequent outbursts for which the boy takes a crush. A challenge in the challenge, between a duo of friends ready to separate into solitary beings due to female intrusion and coming-of-age stories told to the powerful rhythm of heavy metal. Yet winning over schoolmates, however difficult, will not be an impossible undertaking.
Metal Lords Review And Analysis
Metal Lords was born and developed as a work mainly intended for a young target, and as such must be analyzed. The lack of a contrasting photograph in favor of harmonious and colorful lighting, the presence of the parental counterpart in perpetual conflict with the adolescent one, the gap between dream and reality, are fundamental traits for any self-respecting training story. He can wear black, he can wear long hair and scream into a microphone, but in its deepest essence Metal Lords responds flawlessly to the most canonical of coming of age. A timelessness ready to bring into play the strength of a timeless passion for music (and specifically for a somewhat mistreated genre) which once again rises to a lifeline in an ocean of responsibilities and choices that can invest and drag off the coast the teenagers who navigate there without a map or compass.
Whether it is Elvis Presley, or the Hunter of Metal Lords, a bridge of access to one’s own interiority and that of others is hidden in the art of music.an instrument of giving one’s personality through which one can make oneself understood and heard by a world that seems totally deaf to one’s needs. A power that Sollett’s film borrows from the past and relaunches it in new, adrenaline-fueled guises, supported by a tight montage, close to the nature of music videos, ready to pass from details of speakers, instruments, picks, to wider shots, capable of capturing different souls united by the power of music. The direction itself is never inappropriate, but complicit in this game of mirrors, supporting with movements that are never exasperated but always inclined to the narrated moment, an equally simple and not very complex narrative structure.
It’s a simple tale, Metal Lords and so it had to be. A masterpiece cannot be expected for a work aimed at young minds, in the process of formation and maturation. It must be formed and developed on fertile ground, but lightly burdened by directorial virtuosity or redundant metaphors it does so that the underlying message arrives loud and clear, without rhetorical obstacles. What for an adult audience accustomed to cinephile taste may be banal, in the eyes of boys and girls of school age is instead a pure essay on the condition of a group of young men and women who for age issues feel unheard, misunderstood, ignored. It is a direct communication, just as the language of music is direct, supported by performances capable of enhancing the humoral mutation of the moment and the different psychologies of their characters.
Jaeden Martell entrusts the shy and condescending character of his Kevin to a performance based on subtraction, while Adrian Green Smith is a whirlwind of emotions rendered by an expressive mimicry in perfect harmony with the moods of the character.
Precisely for a simplicity of story capable of establishing a privileged relationship with its spectators, where Metal Lords stumbles dragging itself to the edge of the ravine, it is in approaching equally delicate themes because they are close to the personal experiences of adolescents. These are moments that, precisely because they were borrowed from everyday life and from stories of life lived beyond the screen, deserved more depth of investigation, pausing for a moment that simplistic way of telling that characterizes the rest of the story.
Those of Metal Lords are subjects who try to reverberate as sounding boxes the micro-social tensions within a universe like the school one, marking the loss of the individual in front of the loss of certainties and of a place in the world. Spokespersons of a universe fueled by the breath of life infused by rock, K Evin and Hunter are simulacra of tensions and fears, dreams and ambitions experienced by those who feel marginalized. A personal story, theirs, which is elevated to universal, peppered with numerous musical references, both to the sacred monsters of the genre (Maiden, Slayer, Metallica and Pantera), as to less known but equally fundamental bands such as Celtic Frost, Anthrax and King Diamond.
But precisely because it reflects a world full of insecurities such as that of adolescents, in turn emphasized by the love for a rebellious and sidelong musical genre, that of the protagonists becomes a story that tries to embrace even more sensitive sides to today’s generations. and yesterday. A hug made with the light touch of a feather and not with the power of a drumstick on the drum. Drug addiction, sex and mental illness are issues that are as much part of the essence of the protagonists as of their counterpart on the other side of the screen. Hinted at, but never really deepened, these arguments are mere extras emptied of content within an existence of which they should instead impersonate the role of main characters.
Nefarious puppeteers play and manipulate the behaviors and thoughts of the characters in the film; held on either side of the story, aspire to the good and interesting that has been achieved so far, weakening the final result of a work that could have been the final shock of a youthful representation in the cinema stopped on the rhythm of a flat electrocardiogram. Metal Lords is therefore a song with an engaging and rampant incipit, but which has not been able to exploit the power of its riff, getting lost in the darkness of the verses composed between the final choruses.
Metal Lords Review: The Last Words
We conclude our review of Metal Lords by underlining how much the film available now on Netflix contains a funny, simple and engaging story, well done technically, but which when it could touch deeper chords takes a step backwards falling from the stage without applause from the audience. The simplicity of the story is justifiable, but if we mention more delicate issues, we must at least deepen them, especially given the target to which it is addressed.
