Glee: The 3D Concert Movie [Brief Aside by Haus]

If you’re a fan of the TV series Glee, this review is not for you. You know things I do not.

I write this for the admittedly tiny fraction of people who, like me, have never seen the popular program yet nonetheless feel tempted to watch Glee: The 3D Concert Movie. My advice: Don’t.

I don’t understand what this film is. It bills itself as a “concert documentary shot during the Glee Live! In Concert! summer 2011 tour.” It is not this. I’ve seen concert documentaries. I even saw one aimed at shrieking quivering tweens. (And it was actually quite good — I went in knowing next to nothing about Justin Bieber, and left with a basic understanding of his ascent and a decent exposure to his music. Sure, it was massaged faux-doc shriek-on-cue fanboi stuff, but it was fun and it did what it promised.) Glee 3D isn’t a documentary. It isn’t even a behind-the-scenes look. The actors, from what I can discern, are in character and play their TV roles “backstage.” They appear to sing the very same covers of popular songs that they have already sung on television. Seriously. That’s what this is. A bunch of kids you’ve never seen before singing covers of stuff you could have seen for free on Fox.

The film consists entirely of such musical numbers, interspersed with three vignettes. These are interviews with real-world youth who are “different” (one is gay, one is a little person, and one has Asperger’s syndrome) and who share in common a belief that Glee (the show) has helped them accept themselves. This presumably is a positive development for them. (Although in my diagnosis one subject displays an unhealthy and near-pathological obsession with a particular Glee character.) We’re told again and again that Glee has made people accept and embrace their faults, their inner geek. But we’re not shown why.

To say that this film made no sense to me is a reckless understatement. I found it especially jarring when, about halfway through, the fellow in the wheelchair got up and walked around — then started dancing. Precisely how does this make wheelchair-bound people feel better about themselves? Is the larger girl going to pull off a fat suit and inspire some overweight kids, too? Maybe it’s some Glee inside joke. There’s so much going on here I can’t even begin to speculate.

In sum, this is a movie of a concert of television characters singing covers of other people’s songs that they previously sang on television. Read that again. That’s at least quadruply derivative. I’m not even sure where to begin. It’s like a film attempt at infinite recursion. It’s a buffer overflow.

I studied the wall designs in the theater for about a third of it, and spent the balance wondering what in the world I was watching, and why it needed to be in 3D. One thing is for certain: It provoked very little glee.

HAUS VERDICT: If you’re wondering what makes Glee so popular, keep wondering. Whatever it is, it’s absent from this.

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.