ABBA: The Movie (1979)

Pretty Good

Lack of good storyline.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The idea of a coproduction between Australia and Sweden might sound a little strange, but it happened with this movie. The results suggest why there hasn't been another attempt to date. Whether you are an ABBA fan or not, you'll more likely than not find the movie unsatisfying. Yes, there's plenty of ABBA music, but surprisingly most of it is not played completely, which will likely frustrate fans. Also, the concert sequences are not particularly well directed and edited; the only number that really comes to life is the "Dancing Queen" number (which IS played the entire way through.) What's most annoying about the movie is that while it promises to take a look at the ABBA band members in depth, we learn next to nothing about them. Much of the movie is instead devoted to an incompetent Peter Fonda clone whose ineptness and stupidity become annoying pretty fast. I can only recommend the movie to die hard ABBA fans, and even they will more likely than not find large portions of the movie hard to sit through.

Looking back on this movie, for me it is a nostalgia piece. With the exception of Abba of course playing themselves (hey, you wouldn't want them any other way) it's male lead, a failed actor, who's not very favorable at the moment of course, plays a haggard and inept reporter traveling across cities, trying to score an interview with Abba to little avail. Being an Adelaideian, you see little of our small city in the film (be thankful for what you do see) but it brings back memories. I was six when Abba was the thing. They were so big, only one can imagine, how big they would be today. There's hardly a song of theirs I hated, and they wrote a hell of a lot of songs, more than the number of Elvis movies. Hughes galavanting around, always coming up against Abba's bodyguard (Tom Oliver, our shining star in this) is fun to watch, and we share many interviews with Abba fans, we realize this is more than a movie. People were so different then to now. Hey, it might not of been the best movie ever made, but it's the history that makes it as is our famous foursome who are genuine. They don't act. What I liked too, was Hughes fantasizing over our famous female duo, where may'be he has finally scored that interview. That's the burning question, "Will Hughesee ever get that big interview?". It what makes the finale quite gripping if you can believe that. For Abba fans, definitely, or others who like to to stroll down that nostalgic lane.

I am probably the only heterosexual British male of my generation who likes ABBA, or at least who likes them in a straightforward way and not in an ironic, postmodernist spirit of "I know they're naff, but then naff is the new cool!", although I have to confess that in my teenage years, which coincided with their heyday in the seventies, my interest was aroused as much by the good looks of the group's two female members as by their music. So when a film called "ABBA: The Movie" came on British TV recently (as part of Channel 5's "ABBA Night") I just had to watch it.Films made to cash in on the success of pop groups rarely if ever make for great cinema."Spice World" was probably a horrible embarrassment even to the most ardent fan of the Spice Girls (and even more so to the group themselves). The various Beatles films have been praised for their visual style and occasional wit, although I suspect that they will prove a closed book to anyone who is not interested in the Beatles' music. The same applies to "ABBA: The Movie". It deals with ABBA's tour of Australia (a country in which they always enjoyed great popularity) in 1977. It is not, however, a straight documentary, although it probably should have been. Scenes of the band playing concerts in various Australian cities are combined with a feeble plot line about a radio DJ trying to get an interview with them, about which the less said the better. What any ABBA fan will want to watch it for is the music. Anyone who is not an ABBA fan will probably not want to watch it at all.Even ABBA fans may be surprised by some of the music on offer here. Of course, when the film came out the group still had several years of stardom ahead of them and some of what we now think of as their greatest hits, such as "Chiquitita" and "The Winner Takes It All", were still to be written. Even so, the selection of songs may strike some as being slightly eccentric. We get to hear some more obscure offerings such as "When I Kissed the Teacher", "Tiger", the banal "Rock Me" and the shrill and strident "I'm a Marionette", these last two both qualifying for a place on any compilation album of ABBA's greatest misses, but there is no "Knowing Me, Knowing You", "Take A Chance On Me" or "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do I Do", all of which had been written by 1977.Nevertheless, we do get to hear most of ABBA's other great songs from the first half of their career- "Waterloo", "Fernando", "Mamma Mia", "Thank you for the Music", and a number of others. And, more importantly, we get to hear them performed in the original versions, not (as they were in the film version of "Mamma Mia") murdered by the likes of Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan, whose ability to kill a song stone dead proves that he is just as deadly an assassin as his best-known character. And for those whose interest in the group is not purely musical I can report that both Agnetha and Frida were at the height of their beauty in 1977 and both spend much of the film wearing their trademark scanty costumes. 6/10

Forget the plot of the movie-it is banal and uninteresting,the jokes are shallow.Concentrate about the concerts footage of the film and the brilliant music which has already become a pop classic.I have been an ABBA fan since childhood and surprisingly I still think it to be one of the best musical groups in the second half of the 20th century.This film allows you to listen to one of their less-known songs not included in any of their 8 albums-"Get on the caroussel".It was one of the four songs from the musical"The girl with the golden hair".However it was later dropped and only the three others remained in "The Album"-1977.It is very similar to another song from the same album-"Hole in your soul".This film was planned as a documentary about their supersuccessful Australian tour in March 1977 and should have been made that way.Still ,watching ABBA on stage and (more rarely ) offstage is enough to justify watching the film.Long live Agnetha,Bjorn,Benny and Annifrid!!!