A whole year. That's the length of the gap in-between the release of This Is War as a single and the release of the track's official video. Why the massive delay? No-one knows. The video was filmed on April the 7th and originally scheduled for a June release... and then nothing until April when rumours that the video had apparently leaked started circulating around. In response to this, the band went and uploaded the video on their official YouTube page.
It's a glossy Call of Duty-esque take on the band dressed up as soldiers in Afghanistan. Although I'm not really a fan of music videos where the track fades out to fit in a 'film' style segment of action, it doesn't detract too much from the song in this case. To a degree, this is helped by the way This Is War as an album was constructed; the songs fading into each-other and interpolating samples of crowd noise. It was a vastly scenic, soundscaped album, and thus a vast military wilderness represents the perfect setting for the video to the title track from the record.
As Jared climbs from the jeep, gun aloft, to observe all the assorted instruments of war and destruction flying over head, there's a real sense of suspense. All this obviously builds towards the final revelation of the impressive 'pyramid'. This is a music video on the Hollywood scale, with suitably awe-inspiring special effects leading you to speculate on just how much it all possibly cost. Good job it all finally saw the light of day then eh!
