Occasionally, publicity people will mistake us for actual journalists / famous people and give us tickets to movie premieres, and if we manage to keep a straight face long enough (you realize my job is to Photoshop poop onto pictures of Robin’s Top Chef dishes?), we get to attend those premieres. Following a gracious and likely accidental such invitation from Sony, a friend and I were given tickets to the premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It last night, parked ourselves in the second row in the theater (every decent row was blocked off for, I don’t know, like Ian Zieiring or something) and I have to say, despite going in with expectations ranging from “low” to “haven’t thought about it at all,” I was ultimately pretty impressed with the movie.

I was fully expecting the film to be 15 minutes of legit footage padded by enough hastily thrown-together stuff to allow that 15 minutes to be released/made profitable, partially basing my expectations on the trailer and partially just always assuming the worst in terms of MJ post-death exploitation, but every song in the film was spliced together from multiple dress rehearsal-caliber performances and bolstered by clear audio and enough special effects to get a pretty complete idea of the final product.

I also incorrectly assumed — again, based on the trailer — that the movie would be 50% performance footage, 50% backstage/documentary style footage, but it was closer to 90-10, making it essentially just a standard concert film and not quite the revelatory, genre-bending MJ story that the trailer perhaps implied. Some of the movie’s strongest moments feature MJ correcting the band and interacting with the director, exuding the persona of a hardcore diva but minus any ego or meanness; Jackson comes off as a legitimately passionate super-perfectionist who wants everything to be done a certain way, and it’s often up to the musicians and crew to figure that way out despite Michael’s inability to express something so specific through words.

Review continues after the jump. SPOILER ALERT: He was dead the whole time.

Jackson himself still sounds absolutely amazing for 50 (he doesn’t pull the Elton John and just yell high notes cause he can’t hit them anymore), and he hits his dancing stride as the movie goes on, though we’ve already seen so much footage of MJ dancing in his prime, it’s tough to be overly wowed by his actions in this film, other than with the semi-patronizing preface “Remember, this guy’s 50!” It doesn’t help that MJ’s also constantly surrounded by 12 of the best dancers in the world, whose moves — particularly during a “Shake Your Body” freestyle breakdown — are consistently mind-blowing.

Any attempts to analyze this film objectively will be quickly overwhelmed by the childish excitement of seeing Michael Jackson jumping onstage to perform “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”, and that enthusiasm runs throughout the movie, peaking with awesome performances of “Smooth Criminal,” “Beat It,” and “The Way You Make Me Feel.” The show does hit the typical “Ready for this concert to be over 2/3 of the way through” lull, particularly during the ill-timed “Earth Song” and a disappointingly anticlimactic “Billie Jean” closer, but the film reminds you again and again that MJ is one of the very few musicians for whom you could just randomly pick 15 songs in any order and it’d be the best setlist you’ve ever heard.

It’s a unique experience to hear songs like “Billie Jean” or “I Want You Back” while sitting quietly in a dark theater rather than screaming along to it on the dance floor, but that’s just a conceit of all concert films, not necessarily a problem with this movie. But playing “Livin’ On A Prayer” and “Don’t Stop Believing” simultaneously over the credits was just rubbing it in.

I was also impressed by the film’s classy approach to the singer’s death; they didn’t try to turn the ending into some gushy tribute, but just allowed the concert to speak for itself in terms of the man’s lasting significance. I was half-expecting some super overblown ending that you’d end up watching five years from now and saying “Oh man, remember that ridiculous time period right after Michael’s death, when everyone was crazy?” but it really did just focus on the concert itself and didn’t attempt to shoehorn-in any more emotion than was already there.

In general, the footage obviously wasn’t ideal big screen film-quality, the movie provided only brief glimpses (albeit extremely interesting ones) into MJ’s unpretentious concert-prepping persona, and, given the amount of Jackson’s seminal music videos and concert footage already ingrained in our minds, it’s just impossible to be totally overtaken by the movie in a way that someone who’s never seen Jackson’s moves would theoretically be. Not sure who falls into that category — Jodie Foster in the movie Nell?

That being said, the movie left me with one unmistakable impression: If you had attended this completed concert in person, it would’ve been unquestionably the greatest concert you’ve ever seen. By that right, it’s hard to consider this film tribute as anything other than a success.