Sound And Vision: Uwe Boll
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at Nightwish' Wish I Had An Angel, directed by Uwe Boll.
Uwe Boll has been called The Worst Director in the world a lot. Even so much so it became a meme in and of itself. Boll didn't like it, going as far as to fight his critics, literally. In a box ring in this case. But he also leaned into it, playing with his public persona, cameoing in arthouse darling Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. The question remains, is he really the worst director currently working?
Uwe Boll owed much of his Worst of the Worst reputation due to adapting a few videogames back to back. Gamers are known for their opinionated responses (I can't forgive their very negative reaction to daring and endearing gambles like Warcraft and the very first The Super Mario Bros Movie). But they might be right in not being too happy about House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and In the Name of the King, all films that baffle with their inane dialogue, bad acting, terrible cgi and piss-poor editing and camerawork. Memorable inane dialogue like "You did all this to become immortal? Why?""To live forever!".
Around the same time as this trifecta Uwe Boll did direct a somewhat decent music video for Nightwish' Wish I Had An Angel. It is mostly the band performing on a stage, with a lot of expressive lighting work and overbearing wind machines. It's cocky gothrock 101, the music video. It is nothing to write home about, but it is also nothing too embarrassing, except for some weird elements of the set that seem to hint at a connection to Alone in the Dark, and some surprising editing choices pacing-wise. It is almost like there are key elements missing in the transitions.
That is because that was exactly the case. The version most frequently seen online and elsewhere is not the original cut, nor the director's cut. There is an earlier version out there that is way more overt in its tie-in to Alone in the Dark, being a glorified clipshow. The editing is bonkers, in a bad way. It is the kind of clunky video that is embarrassing for Nightwish and Uwe Boll equally, as it does nothing to sell the band, and even less to sell the movie. I am not sure if the band deliberately distanced themselves from the film after it flopped. The film ranked for quite some time in the IMDB Bottom 100, and got a staggeringly low score of 1% on RottenTomatoes. It is not hard to see why the band or the label might not want to sell their single as being part of this movie.
Still, if it was a case of a commercial cover-up, they did a bad job of it. If you search for the video online, it still shows up in its original version as the third option or so, even placed on the record labels official youtube page. The algorithm favors the Alone In the Dark-less cut of this video, or in other words, the one that feels less clunkily Uwe Boll-ish. But regardless, it is luckily not a case of them trying to wipe something entirely out of existence. Which sadly does happen a lot in music video-land, where bootleggers of music videos are sometimes the sole archivers of flopped singles from big artists. Boll might not be the best director ever, and these music videos might not convince anyone of his qualities, they have a right to exist and to be preserved, just like any other art.
