I used to be a big fan of this band. I had all their albums up to 2003's self-titled album. I had started to lose interest by then, but still think their early albums are interesting, mostly due to the unique guitar playing of Geordie. He is one of the most idiosyncratic and original guitar players working in rock music.

However, this movie was poorly done. For a start, the sound mixing was horrible, and it was hard to understand what was being said during much of the movie. I also would have preferred to see and hear more of the personal interactions between the band members, and how they got along over the years, and how the various albums were created. Instead, what we are treated to is the Jaz Coleman clown show. Jaz making countless inane pronouncements on this or that childish and ridiculous occult topic. Jaz really should think about growing up. His juvenile obsession with the occult is extremely tedious. And furthermore, for someone who professes to know so much about the topic, he should at least know how to pronounce Aleister Crowley's name. He mispronounces Crowley's last name. In addition to his occult-mania, we get Jaz the tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, ranting on about more nonsense. How in the world he manages to get up in the morning and put his trousers on is really beyond me.

I've always thought Killing Joke were a bit special so wanted to see if there was anything worth learning from this documentary.

As it turns out the band have an interesting history, particularly with their Occultism background, and this kind of explains the power and shape of the music.

However 2.5 hours is waaay too long for a rockumentary and there was a lot of waffle it could've done without. As well, it must be a top contender in the worse movie sound awards. Much of the dialogue is drowned in soundtrack or lost in sinister rumble or is just plain badly recorded. There's no excuse for it unless you've only got found footage. Fortunately the music audio was OK. Unfortunately there wasn't enough of it.

The other problem is that if you're not a fan, you're not gonna follow the plot. Assumptions are made that the viewer already knows that A) followed B). And when events unfold via incomprehensible mumbling, well, good luck with that. Between the film's length and the crap audio, I found myself drifting off, because it couldn't make me care about what bloke 1 and bloke 2 were saying.

On the plus side, it was nice to get to know the lads, each of them characters essential to the tale and for the undeniable chemical reaction. A glimpse into the fiery mind of Jaz Coleman was fascinating, although, watching in 2022, the frequent references to 'energy' and such feel dated and a bit cheesy, pinned to that Gen X era . The earnest prophetic 'storm coming' bits at the end made me wonder if Jaz might today be a QAnonner. It's a kind of Magick.

Killing Joke are one of the sharpest and most original British bands ever, so it was definitely worth making a film about them. Maybe a better one than this though.

(The graphics/animation in the closing credits was great though.)

When it's covering Killing Joke's music, or the political/social values of the band's members, or the way their music reflected the times, it's pretty good stuff.

When its covering occult topics, horoscopes, and even things like UFOs (briefly),I couldn't really vibe with it. If all that stuff is integral to the band and its members I understand to some extent, but I don't think the documentary interweaved these fairly extreme themes into a music documentary very effectively or coherently.

So it's a mixed bag. Maybe 2/3s of it was quite good, but I wasn't a fan of the other 1/3, so I did end up feeling its two and a half hour long runtime.

But at the same time, I did like watching a documentary on a band I'm not super familiar with- I've only really listened to Night Time of all their albums. They're definitely an interesting and influential band, and this documentary will probably be great to big Killing Joke fans, and decent to pretty good to non-fans like myself.