This thorough and well-assembled music documentary follows the Norwegian pop band A-ha from its earliest beginnings to the present day and their MTV Unplugged performance preparations. Perhaps the tactic of conducting separate interviews with the band members accentuates the feeling of dissociation from each other that the film markedly conveys, but a strength is that the tactic enables good portraits of the three individuals to emerge and some stark honesty about each other and themselves. The film employs a very good range of archive material together with some cute linking Take On Me-style style animations, and there is a pleasingly deep dive into the very early days, although overall the film offers little new to surprise the fans. Like the band, the movie is tinged with typical Scandi-melancholia putting across a barely-existent professional friendship between three very separate musicians with differing ambitions and creative needs, emphasised well in the film as their huge success in the 80s also brought huge tensions between pop success/record company demands and the band's artistic ambitions. The ending of the movie is suitably bleak, as a very personal reveal shows that Magne's heart was literally broken by the band, making the inevitable closing play of the poptastic Take On Me sound unexpectedly sad and hollow.
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