Moonage Daydream

9 / 10

A retrospective spectacle thriving with vibrancy

Brett Morgen coalesces the eclectic presence and discography of David Bowie into a 140 minute-long stargate sequence filled with very colorful imagery, massive sound and transforms the cinema into a spaceship taking off with musical high speed in the form of the Pet Shop Boys’ remix of “Hallo Spaceboy”. Cold-warm contrasts, archival footage, visual fragments with wide-ranging resolutions shaped and remixed with the beat – Morgen edits the viewers’ audiovisual journey with a rhythm akin to David Hughes’ work on Adult Swim’s Off The Air series and a climactic pattern which starts to wear down a bit towards the end. Nonetheless, Bowie’s live performances have such a drug-like intensity that you start to wonder: How can the director surpass this segment with the next one?

He finds a way to push the brake for a moment in order to portray Bowie’s confrontation with his art through the global adventure. Morgen is not interested in an encyclopedic examination of his personal life – Francis Whately’s documentaries such as The Last Five Years are there to take a deep dive into his music – but more into the artist’s mind and the breathtaking atmosphere that his personas ignited in the concert halls. If Whately’s films deal with Bowie’s acoustic microcosm, then Brett Morgen presents his macrocosm with a philosophical telescope that the artist himself provides. Moonage Daydream is a condensed, albeit bombastic experience and celebration of David Bowie’s experimental output with the ultimate goal of catapulting the viewer into his space once more.