This obscenely self indulgent vanity production was just one of the many multi media cogs in the machine that was the Michael Jackson industry in the late 1980s. A two hour hymn to the perceived majesty of its own creator, it left a bitter taste of self-glorification at the time of its release and was even less palatable in the wake of Jackson’s much publicised child abuse allegations that started to emerge in 1993, just a few years after Moonwalker was released.
Beginning with a stage performance of the song Man in the Mirror that seeks to equate Jackson with John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the film soon enters dubious territory when it begins to intercut footage of starving famine victims with shots of one of the world’s wealthiest individuals cavorting about a stage – perhaps if he really meant to do something for the starving millions, he should have donated the budget of Moonwalker to deserving aid agencies.
After a lightning tour of Jackson’s early days with the sartorially challenged Jackson Five (including footage of swarming rats to accompany the rodent love song Ben (1972)) and an equally swift compilation of Jackson’s solo videos, we’re off on what laughably passes as a plot. That it takes more than twenty minutes to actually arrive at this point offers some indication of what the film was actually all about. After much self-adoring squeaking, squealing, jerky dancing and clutching of dicks, it becomes horribly clear that all we have here is a loose collection of bits and pieces designed to complement a smattering of Jackson’s songs.
Director Jerry Kramer, cinematographers Thomas E. Ackerman, Robert E. Collins, Frederick Elmes, John Hora and Crescenzo G.P. Notarile and effects houses Dream Quest Images and Filmtrix ensure that some of the visuals are quite striking and, released as standalone promo videos (one of the sequences, for Leave Me Alone, was, they may have worked. But stringing it all together as a feature results in a film so incoherent and unsure of its identity that it becomes all but unwatchable. There’s no denying that in some of the individual sequences there are moments of extreme technical skill (the surreal Leave Me Alone rates as the film’s only truly interesting passage) but being forced to consume it in one indigestible lump is just too much to expect any sane audience to do. No-one involved seems to have had any clear clue what they were trying to do here – is it a narrative feature, a documentary or a concert film? That it fails spectacularly on all three counts is no surprise, perhaps, but did it really need to be this nauseatingly self-indulgent?
The ultimate message of Moonwalker is that Michael Jackson and his cohorts loved Michael Jackson more than anyone else was capable of. It offers absolutely no insight into the undoubtedly complex private persona that lay behind the public mask and seeks only to sell the fans more of what they already knew and wanted. The uninitiated will still be unable to determine quite why this ludicrous prancing stick insect managed to attain such adoration – three minutes of listening to him grunt and squeal in that irritating manner of his (Tourettes Syndrome set to music) is bad enough, but two hours…?
Even in death Michael Jackson remains something of an enigma – his personal life appears, from the evidence on show, to have ranged from the thoroughly sordid to the simply bizarre while his professional career went virtually unchecked on its unstoppable course. This dichotomy is not even hinted at in the squeaky clean Moonwalker which is, ultimately, just a vapid two hour promo showcasing the skills of assorted special effects technicians. On that level – and on the level of self-aggrandising indulgence – it’s a mild success. Though who but the most devoted of Jackson’s fans would wish to spend two hours of their lives watching a lonely, troubled and ultimately rather pathetic superstar writing visual love poems to himself?
The EOFFTV Review 