DIRECTED by Kenny Ortega, the movie is stitched together from more than 100 hours of taped rehearsals for the 50-concert comeback tour in London that he and Jackson were creating together. Ortega, working with four editors (Don Brochu, Brandon Key, Tim Patterson and Kevin Stitt), has punched the material into classic behind-the-scenes documentary shape, which is captured in high definition with state-of-the-art digital sound and features interviews with some of Jackson’s closest friends and creative collaborators.
Review
IT is one of the most revealing music documentaries I’ve ever seen.
Never raising his voice, never showing anger, always soft-spoken and courteous to his cast and crew, Michael with his director, Kenny Ortega, micro-manages the production. Here we see that he was the auteur of his shows.
His audience in this case consists entirely of stagehands, gaffers, technicians, and so on. They love him. They’re not pretending. They love him for his music, and perhaps even more for his attitude.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
IT proves that, at the end, he was still a thriller. Fans and doubters alike can look at the gentle, driven singer-dancer at the center of this up-close documentary and say admiringly, this was him.
Richard Corliss, time.com
JACKSON is not playing to a crowd in this film, but this doesn’t seem to matter to him. Clearly he already has his fans fixed in his mind’s eye. Like most great performers, Jackson could swing onstage in a state of rapt singularity and yet also never lose sight of his audience.
In the film’s most beautifully understated moment, he completes a particularly sweet move and then stands there, stock-still, with a beatific smile, as the lights fade out. He was his own greatest taskmaster — and appreciator.
Peter Rainer,
The Christian Science Monitor
THE big fear was that fulsome homages to the man and his talent would smother This Is It in a coating of treacle; thankfully, Ortega limits it to the occasional sobbing outburst from the dancers or choreographers. We are instead offered genuinely interesting tidbits of Jackson’s stagecraft, in the shape of intense discussion of cues, cherry-pickers and trapdoors.
