Review: This Is It

It’s ironic that this years most eagerly anticipated film is also the years most unfortunate. Had a cocktail of painkillers not sent Michael Jackson’s heart into overdrive on that fateful evening of June 25^th the world could well be talking about pop’s greatest comeback. Instead we are left wondering: if only.

This Is It compiles hours of footage –originally intended for Jackson’s own collection - of rehearsals for the unprecedented fifty-night tour of London’s o2 Arena. What quickly becomes apparent is that this is not a man who only days later would be dead.

The documentary shows a performer still at the top of his game despite surpassing the half-century mark and one willing to pull out the moonwalks and “chamones” for one last hurrah. Jackson keeps up with dancers half his age and also shows how hands-on he was with both the music and choreography: a side that most would never have seen. Indeed, at times it’s as though the whole production operates to the baton that is Jackson’s out-stretched hand.

Director Kenny Ortega, who along with Jackson created the concert, shows CG footage of how major stage set pieces would have worked together with movies that accompanied introductions to some of Jackson’s most well known songs. The most memorable of the mini-movies shows him in a shoot-out with Humphrey Bogart to the opening of Smooth Criminal and a 3D re-shoot of Thriller.

So, would the concert have catapulted Jackson back to the top? Well, the success of This Is It at the box office suggests it would have (over $200million so far with an extended release in the pipeline) and the footage shown in the documentary certainly guarantee’s that it would have been unlike any other concert. But whether a frail fifty year-old man could have survived the initial fifty dates followed by a suspected world tour remains to be debated.

Much attention prior to the documentary’s release was, inevitably, surrounding the star’s health. His is undeniably underweight and his face seems gaunt and relatively expressionless, even when he’s happy. But overall this is a man whose fate was not sealed on stage but by personal dilemmas and an unwillingness to settle for anything less than what was expected of Michael Jackson.