Even in its unpolished form, This Is It is pure spectacle. In the Spring of 2009, Michael Jackson was prepping for his final tour, "This Is It." Less than three weeks before the tour kicked off, Michael Jackson died, leaving fans dumbstruck. Directed by Kenny Ortega, This Is It is a two-pronged look at the tour. Though most of the feature focuses on Jackson's meticulous planning and performances, it also offers glimpses of the faces around the tour. From his backup band and singers to the fresh-faced background dancers, This Is It attempts to offer a wide view of the never-realized tour and its impact on... well, everything.
The approach is a partial success. Jackson is portrayed as a perfectionist with a hand in every aspect of the show, from projections to dance moves to music. At one point, Jackson chides a band member for playing a keyboard part slightly off tune with the remark, "Let's do it the way I wrote it." Seeing how the musical pieces turned out, it is hard to argue with his hands-on approach. Though his personal life was easy fodder for jokes, I've always regarded Jackson as one of the greatest entertainers of all time. This Is It only further cemented these feelings.
While managing to paint a vivid story of Jackson's creativity and energy, the "story" Ortega attempts to tell doesn't come off as well. I liked seeing the enthusiasm from the dancers and musicians, but in the end, all I really wanted was more Michael. After watching the extra features, I really felt some of that footage, like the two projection-focused "Making of..." segments, would work better as part of the main feature and make for a stronger overall "narrative." In fact, you could probably take all of the extras and the feature and re-edit them into two amazing features rather than a great feature and its extras. The two-part tour documentary ("The Adventure Begins" and "Beyond the Show"), as well as "Memories of Michael" cover the memories of everyone involved with the show and, to a lesser extent, Jackson's career. "The Gloved One" covers costume design and would have fit well in the feature while the dancer and background features would have worked better in the "Auditions" extra. All of the extras are worth watching, but it was hard to not see them as a glimpse of something much greater. I was happy, however, that This Is It and its extras are presented as more of a celebration of Jackson rather than a memorial, which is fitting.
Story beats aside, This Is It also faces a problem found in any taped live performance. Though you get a sense of the show's content, you never get a full sense of the performance's scale. As impressive as the show's projections look, they don't work quite as well on a small screen as they would have live. Director Kenny Ortega and Michael Jackson both describe how things are supposed to work in the live show, but the cobbled together presentation only shows a brief glimpse of where everything was going. It also doesn't help that most of the projections are meant for an enormous 3D LCD screen. It looks and sounds great (at least on the Blu-ray copy) but the "Wow" factor isn't there, particularly on the "Thriller" segment. Even in 3D, it would probably come off as a little goofy, but at least you'd have the visual "pop."
Although Ortega deserves credit for developing a story from what was intended to be vault footage, it's not enough to really engage anyone for long. This Is It deserves a spot in any Jackson fan's library, but for the merely curious, it offers an evening of great music from one of the world's greatest performers, but not much beyond.
