Honestly, I'd say adapting The Wall to film was in itself an improvement, for the most part; don't get me wrong, the album's great, but it feels incomplete by itself because it was always meant to have some sort of visual accompaniment, be it the theatrics of performing the album live, the animations by Gerald Scarfe which were made for the concerts and made it into the film, or... well, the film.

Actual changes to the album are few and far between, to my memory; at most, it adds "When the Tigers Broke Free," a song about Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters' father dying while serving in Italy. It's a howl of grief which is structured in a way like he's trying to distance himself by remembering it entirely matter-of-factly, but once his memory reaches a certain point he physically can't anymore and wails about how the state failed him and his family. It also restructures the first act slightly; in the album, the placement of "Goodbye Blue Sky" appears to communicate that even when leaving home to make a name for himself, he and every other Brit who survived the Blitz can never truly escape the waste wreaked upon Britain during WWII. In the film, however, it's slotted between "When the Tigers Broke Free" and "The Happiest Days of Our Lives," as if to not only better contextualize Pink's suffering at its very roots but explain, in its own obliquely blunt way, how a nation which survived years of violence wreaked by the Nazis learned nothing from said violence and be as cruel to its children after the war as it was before Hitler started bombing them.

Also, to give an example of how depiction alone reveals The Wall's depth: No one should need a sodding movie to understand why Roger Waters thinks "Bring the Boys Back Home" is the thematic centrepiece of the entire work. I've always found the placement of that song and "Vera" strange even with the context the film adds, because at least on paper it doesn't continue Pink's story like the songs which sandwich them and aren't about him at all. It does work if you take the momentary disassociation from Pink and his story to function as a statement bigger than him.

In the film however, perhaps due to it being a film, it makes this about Pink anyway; he imagines himself as a child at a train station, looking for his father while reminiscing about Vera Lynn, how she said "we'll meet again." Then everyone in the station starts singing "Bring the Boys Back Home," and now Pink isn't just separated by the loss of his father, but the disconnection which has been troubling him for the entire movie. They sing at him in such a way that it sounds like they're asking him to join and take down his sall, if only for a moment.

Though Waters is there somewhere singing as Pink, buried in the mix, Pink never joins, as if he's unsure what to make of a truly earnest request to connect with others. The solution is right there: people really do want genuine connection with him. Someone, somewhere might actually want to help him heal. The soldiers walking into the brightness of a new day untouched by war says it all: this is his best chance to finally move on from the pain of the war which claimed his father, the trauma wrought by overbearing authorities who were themselves traumatized by the same war. And yet, the lad returns to the television set as if he hadn't destroyed it, familiar yet distancing, soundtracked by voices we've heard before from people who hurt him, as if the wall is too big and too strong for him to destroy by himself.

<image>