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Without its unfortunate events and outcome, this would had been an extremely mediocre documentary to watch, in all honesty.

I wouldn't even necessarily call this a documentary. It's more like a registration of events but without any background- and insight information given. No interviews, no voice over and no explanations or whatsoever given. You might like this kind of approach but to me the first half came across as a very mediocre registration of some The Rolling Stones concerts.

But don't worry, things start to turn more interesting after a while. First of all, it all starts to become more interesting the moment things are starting to come together for the 'Altamont Free Concert', which was supposed to be a sort of response to 'Woodstock' but things are starting to become even more interesting when things are starting to hit the fan, during the concert.

I think that everybody is already very familiar with all of the events that went down but this documentary actually shows you how it all happened and things started to go from bad to worse. It even shows you the fatal stabbing and some of the other brutalities, committed by the Hell Angel's, who were brought in by by the management of The Rolling Stones, as security during the concert. Granted that they got aggravated by a stoned crowd but things should not never gotten as far as they did.

If this documentary is also one other thing, it's a great anti-drugs film! Loads of people attending the concert obviously were high off of something and no, I'm not even talking about Keith Richards. This documentary is such a huge contrast with another documentary "Woodstock", which was a registration of the Woodstock concert, held in the same year, with the same sort of crowd attending. While Woodstock was peaceful, Altamont Free Concert had a totally different atmosphere to it. Violence and a constant sense of treat and danger, was very much present and gets made sensible in this documentary, mostly due to the drug use, which made some of the people do some very crazy and scary stuff. In all of those regards, this documentary is also a great and intriguing one to watch.

Otherwise, no this is not a great documentary by any means. It's not that well shot and isn't being an insightful one in any way. Also please don't watch this expecting to hear lots of great Stones music. There is music present of course but it's really not being the thing that this documentary is all about. Besides, the Stones aren't exactly sounding at their best in this, to be very honest. And yes, I like Stones music! This documentary just simply isn't really about them at all, which is all due to it that there were simply bigger things happening.

It's like a registration of music history, that shows one of the most shocking and dreadful events to ever happen during a large concert. In that regard this is perhaps also being somewhat of an essential viewing!

8/10

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About Frank Veenstra

Watches movies...writes about them...and that's it for now.
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