Pink Floyd: The Wall Reviews

This overlong, tedious film based on the multimillion-selling record album by Pink Floyd stars Boomtown Rats singer and "Live Aid" organizer Bob Geldof as Pink, a successful, narcissistic, and wholly unsympathetic rock star on the verge of burnout. Driven to the edge by the news that his wife has left him for another man, Pink spirals into a neurotic conglomeration of flashbacks and fantasies detailing his life. A child of WWII, he grows up amidst the horrors and ruins of wartime Britain. Eventually he becomes a star singer, in the process discovering his power to manipulate a crowd for his own satisfaction (much as his own schoolteachers manipulated and dehumanized him when he was a boy). Cut off from human feeling, Pink slowly builds a wall around himself to deflect suffering. While the music may be interesting and effective on vinyl, on film it becomes repetitious and pretentious, despite director Alan Parker's flair for flashy visuals. Thematically the film is banal, and even its simple themes of alienation, loneliness, and paranoia are muddled and sapped of relevancy by the overblown treatment. Geldof is effective in the lead, and the animation sequences by political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe are interesting and well executed, though too long. Rabid Pink Floyd fans have supported this film enthusiastically since its inception and look upon it as one of the greatest rock 'n' roll films of all times (it isn't).