Metal Lords

Written by "Game of Thrones" co-creator D.B. Weiss, "Metal Lords" is small and patchy even by the standards of a Netflix comedy.

It’s only when SkullFucker is behind their instruments that the movie goes hard enough to find something cathartic in the same dissonance that holds the rest of it back. The only problem is that Kevin and Hunter need a bassist, and they’re fresh out of friends. All that matters to Hunter is that, by some wild stroke of good luck, his shy buddy Kevin happens to be a totally sick drummer. Flimsy and stilted as this thing might be on a scene-by-scene basis (an awkward bit in which SkullFucker auditions new bassists crystallizes the botched “‘Sing Street’ meets Judas Priest” vibe), Sollett’s movie vividly radiates with the all-too-relatable energy of being an unmoored kid who’s looking for any kind of identity that might anchor you in place. Screenwriter D.B. Weiss may be a bonafide head-banger who’s spent most of his career trying to bring SkullFucker to the screen — the “Game of Thrones” co-creator first began shopping the script before he ever stepped foot in Westeros — but most of the story beats in this overfamiliar coming-of-age saga are as metal as the Imagine Dragons cover that SkullFucker’s rivals bust out during the climactic face-off. The devil is in the details when it comes to “Metal Lords,” which turns out to be the saving grace of a film that desperately needed the devil to show up somewhere.

There is a movie about metalheads. But not just any devotees to metal music, oh no. This is a film about two musicians in a metal band that love this craft and ...

Metal Lords is just the kind of teen comedy you’d expect a Netflix algorithm to spit out. The dissonance between the schmaltzy air of Metal Lords and such a deeply disturbed protagonist makes for a most disagreeable kind of viewing. The nadir of her role comes in a supposedly cheer-worthy moment in the third act that, among other grave shortcomings, shamelessly rips off Grease and The Breakfast Club. Even the use of metal music itself is uninspired. Screenwriter D.B. Weiss trots out a doctor character in the third act to practically turn to the camera and reassure the viewer that Hunter isn’t a sociopath. Instead, save for the occasional use of Dutch angles, Metal Lords often has a flat look with no interesting uses of lighting or blocking to speak of. Nobody is going to be invested in this kid who makes Bender from The Breakfast Club look like Paddington Bear. Even if there wasn’t a vastly superior movie about struggling metal musicians to compare it to, though, Metal Lords would still be a decidedly off-key enterprise. Somehow, this problem in Metal Lords gets even worse once it embarrassingly tries to address it. Hunter is the problem with Metal Lords, plain and simple. But the film he occupies doesn’t recognize the seriousness of his actions. Watching this film, you can’t help but get swept up in the camaraderie and dedication to this craft, even if you don’t know Avenged Sevenfold from Slipknot.

D.B. Weiss' Netflix movie Metal Lords seems to have been equally inspired by Lukas Moodysson's 2013 kid-punk movie We Are the Best! and Weiss' own teenage ...

No matter what happened in the first 90 minutes of Metal Lords, it needed to culminate in a great musical moment. The day a metalhead first hears “War Pigs” (or “Master of Puppets,” or “The Number of the Beast”) often ends up feeling like the first day of the rest of their life. Less convincing is the film’s depiction of Emily, a kind of Metal Pixie Dream Girl who serves as a love interest for Kevin, as well as what Hunter cringingly calls a “Yoko” for Skullfucker. She’s introduced in a scene where she screams at the school’s marching-band director (author Chuck Klosterman) and spikes her clarinet into the turf. (Counterpoints: Game of Thrones is metal as hell, and metal elitists should just get over themselves already.) Lukas Moodysson’s anarchic 2013 feature We Are the Best! — a clear influence on Metal Lords — is steeped in punk, not metal, but it also bestows loud music on its disaffected teen protagonists as an amulet against the conformity of their Swedish hometown. His none-more-black wardrobe, the posters on the walls of his rehearsal space, and his knee-jerk rejection of all non-metal music leave no doubt. That describes Metal Lords’ Hunter — but it pointedly doesn’t hold true for Kevin, or for Skullfucker’s eventual third member, the classical-loving cellist Emily (Isis Hainsworth). Metal Lords does its most interesting work in the gaps between its leads’ relationships to the genre. It’s a slight film, and an almost self-consciously low-key follow-up to the massive Game of Thrones, but Weiss has the personal experience to make its humbler ambitions work. He channels all his energy into cultivating an encyclopedic knowledge of metal and practicing the guitar. Metal Lords centers on a pair of childhood best friends with a gulf widening between them in their middle teens. Kevin doesn’t know much about the music, but he agrees to play drums in Skullfucker, the high-school band Hunter believes will conquer the world. In August 2019, just a few months after the polarizing finale of Game of Thrones aired on HBO, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff inked a $200 million deal with streaming giant Netflix. Their eagerness to move on to other projects was apparent by the end of Thrones’ run, but the stream of new material has come at a trickle so far.

Game of Thrones' D.B. Weiss hopes you get caught in the mosh of his screenplay about teen outcasts.

Thou shall not question Hunter’s cred or authenticity as a character, a guy who is metal all the time and declares everything around him to be metal or not metal (and for what it’s worth, and you probably already came to this realization, Game of Thrones is very thoroughly metal). His best buddy is a meek dorkish type, Kevin (Martell), who joined the marching band so he could get out of phys ed. Our Call: STREAM IT. Nobody’s gonna be moved to tears or strain themselves laughing, but Metal Lords is more likely to win you over than lose you in the mosh. In that sense, the movie’s doing more than just exploiting a niche for a few cheap laughs, instead showing honest affection for the music, for how fun it is to take such OTT stuff so seriously. A battle of the bands looms on the horizon, and nothing could fulfill Hunter’s power fantasies more than showing all those preppies and jocks and mean girls how hard he röcks. That’s Hunter (Greensmith), an unforgiving, uncompromising teenager who lives for metal, and if you take a look at him and think he’s a bit of a stretch of a caricature, I’m here to assure you that there are people in real life who are pretty far gone just like him, and I know some of them. The heavy metal subculture gets co-opted for coming-of-age dramedy fodder in Metal Lords, now on Netflix. Fun fact: Game of Thrones co-creator D.B. Weiss is a Metal Guy, so he scripted and produced this story starring newcomer Adrian Greensmith as a leather-and-denim diehard headbanger and Jaeden Martell as his best drummer buddy, who contend with the usual high school hardships – while wearing Iron Maiden and Celtic Frost T-shirts, of course.

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Metal Lords, written by Game of Thrones EP D.B. Weiss, never quite turns it up to 11 the way its attitude suggests. In the vein of The School of Rock, Metal ...

It's the story of Kevin (It's Jaeden Martell) and Hunter (Adrian Greensmith) and Emily gets left in the dust as the movie never takes advantage of her as character the way it should. The message the movie tries to make about what makes metal great and worthwhile gets drowned out in the clunkiness of the structure and characters. Though the film is steeped in metal lore, and even features some metal/rock greats in surprising cameos (plus huge metal fan Joe Manganiello in a small role), it's less of a "misfits form an alliance to rock out and make the most of their suburban trappings" tale than it is the story of one angry, obsessed metal fan, Hunter, sort of forcing his best friend, the somewhat indifferent Kevin, to learn metal songs on the drums so he can achieve his own very narrow dreams. Here they land flat, with no effort put into making the bully anything more than a bore, the mean dad anything but unnecessarily boorish, and the female lead anything but dependent on having one of the two leads boys in her scene. In the vein of The School of Rock, Metal Lords centers on two high school best friends navigating adolescence while kinda-sorta gearing up for a Battle of the Bands (that old movie chestnut), in search of a bassist who can help turn them into a real band and not just an experimental act. Metal Lords, written by Game of Thrones EP D.B. Weiss, never quite turns it up to 11 the way its attitude suggests.