This movie reminds me on a conversation with my father in the early 90s. I was a teenager and a huge fan of Nirvana and he, an old hippy in his 40s was not able to understand whats going on when we both together watched MTV for some minutes. He grew up in a world in which his parents generation were Nazis, he was extraordinary sensitive about this subject, but so was i, maybe BECAUSE of that music i was hearing. That time i went to 3 concerts a week, and i have to admit that i sometimes haven't felt well when the audience claped as one big mass and idolized those people on the stage. This experience must have had the director of this movie, who was born during the 2nd WW and who was 10 when the Nazi regime was finally defeated, but his position was even in the late 60s, when this film came out, that of an old man and absolutely not very progressive. Even the style of "mockumetary" wasnt something which haven't other people at that time have done already. What's the positive thing about using the style of an Mockumentary? You get closer to the people, it feels more real and not so much planed, but this film failed absolutely in that way. You never feel that this persons are real, they are super-flat and talking just those 2-3 sentences which are really needed to tell this even extraordinary flat story, which has just 4 or 5 waypoints they had to reach. If you have read 5-6 sentences about the plot you have already heard everything which you will see in this movie. There is nothing more! There is no elaborated futuristic world, no deeper insights in the fascist society of this "future", no fundamental critic on the media or society. Some have written here that the main-actor is somewhat flat and hasnt done his work that well, but i have to defend him. He is playing a naive and empty character, in shyness and confusion, and he is doing that quite well, but such a character is somewhat boring and this role doesn't give him more to dig out of it. His, but all other characters in the film as well, are nothing more than cardboard figures. The film has nothing to offer to analyse how a society can drift into a fascist system, nothing critical about society or media, it's just a determination that artists can be used in totalitarian systems. Even rockstars! But yes?! So what?! Thats nothing new that artists in such systems were used and that will happen also in the future, but thats not such a great idea anymore. You are right, when you say that this film was it's time ahead. For example in 2000s there were some quite hard and roaring heavy metal bands which had lyrics in the name of Jesus, which was quite absurd and some people made fun out of it, but it got that big that it was on the radar of music media. And yes, a lot of bands sold their music for comercials, even underground bands, which i thought would be much more integer to their ideas. And yes, there were bands, which were not more than entertainers and market products, but the strange thing is also, that rock music lost also it's importance for the youth of today, maybe exactly because of all that. Loosing its importance is quite obvious: MTV is gone, because noone wants to sea music clips anymore and the youth of today is idolizing YouTube-"Stars", while old people like me are going to festivals which have a line-up just if the 2000s were never gone. With all that, this film lost it's last justification to be still relevant for today. And the music? There are maybe 2 songs with the typical 60s-70s "La la La", which is far away from being that good that popular music of that time, sorry! It's good enough for the movie, to be believable that this singer has some fans, but really not that good that you want to hear it again after watching the movie. I am afraid you all have this film seen decades ago and have just good memories because of it, but time has changed and this film is just a somewhat bad film in TV quality. Go and watch "The Wave" (1981) instead, which is also cheap made, but this one has even today something to enrichen you, this one is super-out-dated and boring. Even a mainstream blockbuster like "Tribute of Panem" has more subversive criticism than this one, and thats really no compliment!
