I grew up in the late 70s and 80s so I just missed the first British Invasion which is just a way to describe all the great British bands that broke out in the 60s like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. These bands are some of my favorite rock bands of that era. Just because I wasn’t around at the start of the creation of Led-Zeppelin doesn’t mean I didn’t start to listen to and enjoy their music. As the years and decades went by, I have become more and more of a fan of this iconic rock band.

Led-Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones have created some of the most amazing rock songs of their era. This documentary starts out by showing where these men came from and how they ended up joining each other to form such a great rock band. It progresses into them talking about how they created their music and went to the United States, where they became huge by touring non-stop while creating more music.

Like most music or celebrity documentaries, this one, which is the first of its kind officially sanctioned by the members of the band themselves, has a lot of talking heads. Mainly, the four band members themselves in what looked like thrones. I noticed they each had their own special chair. The room they were interviewed in was also the same. The  director must have interviewed them each separately in the same location and edited their interviews together. 

The other thing that is very prevalent in documentaries is archival footage. This film has quite a lot of archival footage. I loved all the first-hand footage from concerts and sessions that the band were in creating their music. They went to different locations like the Olympic to record their songs and albums. A lot of the touring was also caught on film and shows many performances that they gave home and abroad. All the performances that were shown on screen were genuinely amazing. Most of which I have never seen myself.

Two technical things I thought were incredibly well done by the director,Bernard MacMahon, and the cinematographer, Vern Meon, were these. The progression of the creation of the songs by the band was accompanied by incredible sound design. The sound in the IMAX Theater I was at sounded like I was at a concert of this band playing all their hits. That’s what I felt leaving the theater. That’s a genuine feeling. I’ve been to many concerts and it felt like that to me there.

The other thing is the band talked a lot about overlapping sounds like drums and bass to create a more cohesive sound for their records, but the cinematographer did the same thing on the film. He used dates and ticket stubs to show the passing of time during the touring dates. The graphics on screen as a whole were very well done. They were easily able to be viewed by me sitting at the back/top of the theaters on screen. I thought this was a very creative way to show the passing of the years and so forth.

The main thing that made this film one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in recent years is the music. The band went in depth on creating each of their albums and all of their iconic songs such as “Whole Lotta Love”, “Ramble On”, and “Dazed and Confused”, to name a few. All the things that went into creating their music were fascinating to me, who isn’t that knowledgeable about music. The filmmaker and the surviving band members mainly focused on the first two albums the band made after they dropped the previous band name, the New Yardbirds. That was Jimmy Page’s band before he formed the new Yardbirds.He was the leader even though the four members had equal collaboration on all of the music. Including Plant as a writer of lyrics eventually. It was a collaborative effort, for sure.

Becoming Led-Zeppelin is an eye-opening music documentary from the perspective of how the music was created. The band members and the director went fully into every part of how the music came to be on the first two albums from this legendary British rock band. I learned so much about their music. Even though I was a fan of it for years, this film showed me many new things about the band and their music that I didn’t know about. I’m an even bigger fan now after having seen the film.

4 ½

Dan Skip Allen