Out of Frame: U23D
For those of you who have never had the pleasure of being right up close at a U2 concert, let me divulge a spoiler: Bono — a.k.a. Paul Hewson, a.k.a. The Fly, a.k.a Mr. MacPhisto, champion of Africa and two-time Nobel Prize nominee, debt-relief crusader and F-bomb-dropping bane of the Federal Communications Commission, the big-brained, big-hearted, big-mouthed and wholly unembarrassable front man for The (all together now!) World’s Biggest Band — is a wee, short little dude. Five-seven, five-eight, tops. When he performs — and truly, no rock and roll frontman has ever looked more at ease serenading a stadium-load of air guitarists than this guy — he wears thick-soled boots that give him an extra inch-and-a-half on the vertical plane. Every little bit helps, right?
But to paraphrase Al Capone, you can get further with a pair of platform shoes and a 3D IMAX film that captures your every messianic gesture in six story high close-up than you can with platform shoes alone.
Thus arrives U23D, the most unambiguously-titled movie since Alien vs. Predator. It’s an 85-minute concert film compiled from a half-dozen early 2006 stadium gigs from U2’s Vertigo Tour. (Two other concert DVDs from the Vertigo Tour have already come out, making it perhaps the most exhaustively-documented rock roadshow since Bono created the world in seven days. Oh, relax, would you? I'm kidding now.) Released through National Geographic exclusively in IMAX theaters, it's the first live-action film to be completely shot and edited using a digital 3D process that James Cameron helped to develop and is using to shoot Avatar, his post-Titanic return to features. The results are, from a purely technical perspective, extraordinary.
Photos courtesy U2
The images have a convincing illusion of depth, and the film’s sound design contributes to the immersive feel by discretely separating different vocal and instrumental sounds. On “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, for example, you hear Bono’s lead vocal in front of you and the Edge’s backing part somewhere behind your head. The sound design also emphasizes the rumble-in-the-gut feel of a concert over a pristine presentation of the music, allowing crowd noise to remain a constant presence in the mix. While no overdubs were added, Bono’s once-mighty vox, an uncertain quantity in recent years, gets a subtle assist, with the film’s audio selectively mixed to hide its limitations.
With their two world tours of the 1990s, Zoo TV and PopMart, U2 did more than any band ever had, practically or artistically, to compress the space of a football stadium into a place where something like intimacy was possible. So it makes sense that they’d want to try to advance the medium of the concert film in the same way. As co-directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington, both longtime associates of the band, U23D errs on the side of taste, preferring long takes to the hyperactive jump cuts of many concert films and avoiding the eye-poking novelty of the other 3D movies you've seen. The “wipe your tears away” passage of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is the only point I can recall at which Bono reaches out physically to “touch” the viewer. Otherwise, the 3-D effect is most striking in the crowd shots, wherein the sea of heads and arms seems to extend outward from the screen even as they vanish into a horizon of camera flashes and illuminated cell phones.
Predictably, the songs included are mostly U2’s Greatest Hits — “Beautiful Day”, “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “One” — but a few worthy album tracks make the cut. Most notable is “Miss Sarajevo", the band’s 1995 elegy for that war-torn city. When Bono sings the Italian verse that Luciano Pavarotti performed on the recorded version, it’s one of the highlights in terms of sheer performance. Meanwhile, the unholy sonic mess that is the botched start of “The Fly” is one of the carefully-chosen moments of imperfection left in, like Adam Clayton’s bungled bass solo on “Gloria” from the Under a Blood Red Sky live EP a hundred years ago. (Okay, it was 1983, but you know.)
Bono’s sometimes eloquent, sometimes tiresome, always criticized sermonizing is all but absent, perhaps because all of the footage is from concerts in countries where English is not the native tongue. But the centerpiece of the Vertigo Tour shows, wherein “Sunday Bloody Sunday” segues into “Bullet the Blue Sky” while Bono dons a headband/blindfold bearing the command “Coexist”, with an Islamic crescent moon representing the “C”, a star of David the “X”, and a cross the “T”, is as powerful on film as it was in person. A few minutes later, when a recording of a woman reading the U.N.’s Declaration of Human Rights introduces “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, you might have to stop yourself from pumping your fist in righteous solidarity.
You’ll want to stay through the credits, which feature some cool animation effects left over, presumably, from the movie proper, as well as a live performance of “Yahweh”.
“You’re all so much smaller in real life,” Bono once told a concert audience. In U23D, the long-lived Irish quartet has finally found the film format to match their outsized ambition. The World's Biggest Band has become, beyond all argument, the world's biggest band. As in, quantifiably. Seems appropriate somehow.
U23D opens Jan. 23 at the National Museum of Natural History’s Johnson IMAX Theatre. Advance tickets are available here. The film, if you care, is rated G.