Film Review | One Direction: This Is Us (1D3D)
A whole lot of harmless, hysterical fun
Even after a good 15 minutes into the Mumbai preview of UK boy band One Direction’s new 3D concert film Thursday night, all we could hear were the screams and chants of teen and tween girls from across the city (some came from as far as Borivali and Thane to PVR in Lower Parel). We may never be able to match names of the baby-faced 1-D boys to their identical skinny European-male-model-like bodies based on the movie, but we now fully understand the power of their young smartphone-wielding fans.
If you don’t already know, like their American counterpart Justin Bieber, 1-D boys, best known for their hit singles “What Makes You Beautiful" and “Live While We’re Young", are constructs of the social media with millions of Twitter followers.
The film sketchily tracks the band’s meteoric rise to stardom starting with a quick recap of how star maker Simon Cowell put them together (in less than 10 minutes, he claims) after the five had auditioned separately for reality-TV music contest, The X Factor. Emotional appearances by their proud parents and grandparents are kept to a minimum and instead full focus is on the boys having a good time jet-setting through their multi-million-dollar-round-the-world tours.
Parents will be happy to note the film is squeaky-clean throughout and is designed to please the devoted fan. Forget sex, drugs or foul language of any kind, the promotional strategy ensures there’s no talk of any girlfriends or love interests whatsoever. Even the pranks never go beyond picking each other’s noses or chasing after security guards in golf buggies.
We even had the added bonus of real-time audio commentary in an international-school accent courtesy our hyper-animated neighbour. The teenager talked back at the screen with full conviction that the boys were listening to her every word. Thanks to her, we now believe the parts where band members demonstrate their hypnotic powers over fans were genuine and not staged. We particularly enjoyed the scene in which 20-year-old Liam Payne directs the volume and intensity of screaming fans with the precision of a world-class music conductor.
The film may be nothing more than glossy propaganda, but really, what wouldn’t your teenage-self give to watch your favourite pop idol in slow-motion and decked out as a superhero, all this while serenading you in 3D?
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