Indeed, if there’s one lesson to be gleaned from this film, it’s that the people outside the band who work on the album have as much influence on it as the band itself. In truth, however, the band struggled with each song, largely because their ambitions often outpaced their talents and knowledge. Since the album is such a monument in rock history, it’s easy to assume that U2’s talents are so great that creating the album was just another day at work. Using interviews of each of the band’s members, producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and recording engineer Flood, the film examines the painstaking process of creating each track. U2: The Joshua Tree, a film originally released in 2000, explores the making of U2’s masterpiece. Taken as a whole, rather than diced into sections, The Joshua Tree is almost biblical in scope, an album that addresses with poignant beauty the gamut of human emotions, fears, and dreams. Indeed, the middle section of the album - “Bullet the Blue Sky,” “Running to Stand Still,” and “Red Hill Mining Town” - represents a better body of work than many bands ever achieve, and if it doesn’t measure up to the first three songs of this album - “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “With or Without You” - it’s only because those three hits are among the greatest rock songs ever written. The album has often been criticized for being front-loaded with hits only to grow weaker as it progresses, but other bands would give their careers to write “Exit” or “Mothers of the Disappeared”. Even by U2 standards, the tracks on the band’s 1987 release are ridiculously superb. Or, The Joshua Tree might be such an influential album because the songs are good. Sonically and thematically, it’s something of an enigma, something completely familiar but equally indefinable. Perhaps this is why The Joshua Tree still has such an enormous impact on modern rock. Likewise, something about it is transcendentally inspirational yet spiritually fatigued, which is fitting for a band that has always had utopian ambitions while obsessed with the sufferings of reality. The name itself is enormous, and perhaps that’s why U2 chose it for their seminal masterwork like the national park, the album is grand, immense, beautiful… Something about it is utterly unworldly yet distinctly American - ironic, yes, for an Irish band.
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