This doco manages to be slick and watchable, but feels like something you'd see on a gay TV cable channel as a bit of light entertainment, rather than a documentary that's going to dig deep or tell you anything new. Many guys are interviewed, with lots of them showing off their bodies, but almost none of them have anything interesting to say. And I'm not blaming them, as it doesn't sound like the filmmakers cared to ask interesting questions to start with. Maybe the film's main aim was just to get as many 'adonis'-like men on screen as possible. Maybe they should have stuck to showing buff bods and kept it all light & humorous without pretending to go into the deeper questions. The main point of the film seems to be that some gay men put a lot of emphasis on how they look, which isn't exactly news. And all the potentially interesting topics are only touched on and then abandoned after a single soundbite. It would have been great for the filmmakers to go into the bigger questions rather than ignoring them - why does there seem to be a racial divide when it comes to what guys go to certain circuit parties? what kinds of trouble do guys get into when overdoing steroids or plastic surgery (just having an overly-plastic plastic surgeon admitting some guys go too far isn't really enough)? how do masculinity issues come into play when gay guys want to bulk up? what psychological or social issues lead some gay men to go to dangerous extremes? why can't some gay men be happy with themselves the way they are? what influence do the buff images in gay p*rn have? what about gay men outside the cities? There are so many questions that this film doesn't bother going into! It's one thing to be fit and healthy, but some of these men seem dangerously obsessed, but they aren't asked terribly probing questions, so we don't learn much about why they are that way. And some gay men who are less obsessed with their looks are included, but there's no real investigation into how they got that way either. So we end up with a brief tour of the subject, without understanding any of it any better. Like interviewing a beautiful woman and asking 'what's it feel like to be pretty'? So it's not a terrible documentary, and technically it's been well put together, but it's a fairly pointless one, and as a gay guy myself, I felt pretty alienated from most of the people in it.
Review of The Adonis Factor
