Nightwish: The Whole Story

I was a huge Nightwish fan during the band's early career. Then I started to feel distant with their later albums. Looking back now it almost seems like "End of Innocence" was the end of the Nightwish I knew. All the good stuff that I really liked came before it, and the film's name already sounds melancholic, like they knew something's over... I even remember when I saw the film first time when it was new. I really liked it but I had the ominous feeling like the golden days of Nightwish belong to the past.

The film is constructed of Tuomas and friends' interviews in the silence of his summer house by the lake, and in between we get a lot of archive material from the madness of tours around the world.

The mystery to me was always what is the "innocence" that he talks about. But nowadays I have my suspicions. Maybe it's - like he says - the fame somehow affects the writing of the music. And maybe it was also about the relationships in and around the band, that started to become more and more complicated along the years.

Speculations aside, this is a highly entertaining, interesting, thought provoking, emotional, and fun documentary film that can be recommended to anyone interested in this kind of musicians' stories.