The recent release of Roger Waters’ “This Is Not a Drill: Live from Prague—The Movie,” provides an opportunity for music fans around the world who did not attend one of the concerts in 2022 and 2023 to experience the show in its entirety.
The film has been released in multiple formats, including theater showings worldwide on July 23 and July 27 and on DVD and Blu-ray disk on August 1. Double CD, four-LP and streaming audio versions are also available. The international popularity of the project is evident, with the album launching at number one on the rock music charts in the UK, France and Germany.
Watching the film, it becomes immediately clear that far more than a live rock concert is involved. Viewers are presented with a montage of music, theater, film, political discourse, and technological brilliance. The performance by Waters and the band—recorded on May 25, 2023, at the O2 Arena in the Czech Republic—delivers both a powerful message and a call to action.
As the World Socialist Web Site’s review of Waters’ performance in Detroit in July 2022 said:
“Such an event, so unusual and important, demands special consideration, above all because it raises to a high and pressing level, in the actual experience of large numbers of people, the issue of the relationship between art and politics in a period of unprecedented crisis.”
It is this aspect of the “This Is Not a Drill” concert film that makes it one of the most significant rock music performances ever and why it deserves the widest possible viewing audience.
From the opening, Waters makes it clear that the show is not a nostalgia act or a trip through the back catalogue of beloved Pink Floyd hits. Instead, it is a warning and appeal for resistance.
Before the band plays a single note, Waters reads a message, and the words appear on the screen instructing those in the audience who only “love Pink Floyd but can’t stand Roger’s politics” to head to the bar. This sets the tone for what follows: two and a half hours of political and social messaging based on and blended with some of the most popular rock music of the past fifty years.
Waters’ primary theme is unambiguous: humanity stands on a precipice, facing the combined threats of genocide, fascist dictatorship, environmental collapse and nuclear annihilation. This existential crisis of mankind is not an abstract question for Waters as images of bombed-out buildings, disasters, police repression, and protests sweep across the giant screen above the stage throughout the show.
References to the genocide being carried out against the Palestinians, a subject Waters has been exposing for decades, are tied to the broader assault on democratic and human rights around the globe. At the heart of the message to the audience is Waters’ insistence that ordinary people must rise up and refuse to accept the corporate-driven descent into dictatorship and catastrophe.
The urgency and impact of the appeal have not gone unnoticed by ruling elites. As another message prior to the start of the film says on screen, “The powers that be tried to cancel my tour in Europe last year. We resisted and the show went on. We will continue to resist.”
The WSWS chronicled the campaign in Germany to slander Waters as an antisemite and cancel his concerts on that basis. Government officials and cultural bureaucrats in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich attempted to deny him access to venues, citing his outspoken advocacy for Palestinian rights and his critique of US-Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the US-NATO provoked war against Russia in Ukraine.
The WSWS described the assault:
“The sinister campaign against one of the most admired musicians of the past 50 years is being conducted because Waters, 79 [now 81], is a fearless opponent of imperialist wars and capitalist reaction. … Waters has notably distinguished himself as a defender of Palestinian rights and an opponent of NATO’s war in Ukraine. Those in power will not forgive him for that. Having banned virtually every critical voice from the private and public media, they are now cleaning out art and culture as well. Any means will do. They slander Waters nonstop as an anti-Semite and Putin supporter, although this has no basis in fact.”
Waters fought back in court and won, with a Frankfurt judge ruling that canceling his performance would be an unacceptable breach of artistic freedom. The legal victory was not just for the tour but for the principle that political art has the right to exist, even when it directly challenges the powers that be.
One of the first things that strikes film viewers is the extraordinary staging. The performance takes place on a 360‑degree stage at the center of the arena, enabling audience members on all sides to feel connected to the musicians. Suspended above is a gargantuan crossed-shaped display made up of twelve panels, which enable everyone in the audience to see the visuals that accompany the music throughout the show.
Chilling lists of those killed by police, casualties of war, footage of protests and conflicts around the world, and at times massive single words in bold lettering on the screens evoke an emotional response. The sound quality is equally immersive. While the live concert featured 150 PA boxes deployed around the venue, the recording of the concert can be played back in multiple surround audio formats.
The musicianship of the band is impeccable. Waters leads an exceptional group of musicians: Gus Seyffert on backing vocals, guitars, and bass; Jonathan Wilson on guitars and vocals; Dave Kilminster on lead guitar and backing vocals; Jon Carin on keyboards, synthesizers, guitars, and backing vocals; Robert Walter on keyboards; Joey Waronker on drums; Shanay Johnson and Amanda Belair on vocals; and Seamus Blake on saxophone.
Together the band recreates the complex arrangements of Waters’ and Pink Floyd’s songs with precision, shifting from quiet acoustic passages such as the opening to “Two Suns in the Sunset” from the album The Final Cut (1983) to the explosive, full-band punctuation of “Run Like Hell,” from the The Wall (1979).
Among Waters’ solo material, the performance of “The Bravery of Being Out of Range” from the album Amused to Death (1992) is a memorable moment in the show. Against a slow-driving rhythm—with Waters on piano, a Kilminster guitar solo and harmonizations by Johnson and Belair—the screen above cycles through the faces of the successive US Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden. Each is labeled as a “war criminal,” with a blunt list of their respective crimes.
With Obama, for example, the indictment reads: “Perfected the use of targeted drone assassinations in violation of international law.” The effect is devastating, a merging of his anti-war song—written after the first Gulf War in 1991—with information that establishes the continuity of US imperialist war crimes by both Democrats and Republicans over the last five decades. Although the performance took place long before the 2024 presidential election, it places the second administration of the fascist Donald Trump within this historical context.
The Pink Floyd catalog is, of course, central to the concert, but Waters does not treat these songs as oldies but as living works that speak to the world of today. “Comfortably Numb,” for example, opens the show in a radically altered arrangement which is slower, darker and without the well-known guitar solo in the original recording of The Wall.
An atmosphere of desolation is presented on the screens, with post-apocalyptic landscapes, the infamous flying pig from the Animals (1977) album, and skies dimmed by a nuclear winter create a mood of tragedy. Waters has explained this version of the iconic song by saying, “The dystopian atmosphere suffusing this version of ‘Comfortably Numb’ is meant to reflect the reality of the world we have created, a world teetering on the brink of destruction.”
“Money,” from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) album becomes an exposé on the inequality of capitalist society five decades later, with images of corporate elites depicted on screen as pigs in business suits and with cash, gold bars, briefcases and handguns.
The band then transitions into “Us and Them” from the same album with footage from the original release combined with images of drones flying over neighborhoods, bombings of Palestinians in Gaza, ICE raids on immigrants and the faces of anonymous people including children who have been forced to endure these crimes.
The performance of “Sheep,” a song from the Animals album is inspired, as explained on-screen, by the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and the warnings made by Dwight D. Eisenhower about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. It encourages the crowd to throw off any identification with being blind followers, i.e. sheep, and—in large red letters—to “Resist Capitalism,” “Resist War,” and “Resist Genocide.”
These are indeed powerful and moving juxtapositions Waters is making between the past and the present.
This is followed by a message that says,
If we don’t resist Genocide
The existential battle
For the human soul
Will be lost
The Hammers [fascists] will have won.It will all be over.
The audience in Prague shows the diversity of Waters’ global fanbase, with a notable number of young people in attendance. Some clips show groups of audience members singing along to both the Pink Floyd classics and the newer Waters pieces and cheering at the various indictments of world leaders.
In summary, “This Is Not a Drill: Live from Prague—The Movie” is a warning—articulated through performances of great rock music classics combined with powerful imagery—that humanity is running out of time. Waters has created a multi-sensory and uplifting statement against the sources of the multi-crisis of our times and delivered it with honesty and conviction.