Bohemian Rhapsody Review

Queen, one of the most legendary bands to ever exist and certainly one of my personal favorites. If you've spent enough time with me, or if you've browsed my music blog enough, you'll probably know that the 80's and the 70's are my two favorite decades of music. Having been born in 1989, I am technically an 80's child, although it's probably more accurate to call myself a 90's kid, but given that I have several older siblings that lived through the 80's, the 80's music and culture was certainly a heavy influence on my early years. And of course Queen played big into that with songs like "We Will Rock You," "We Are the Champions" and "Another One Bites the Dust." I think I'm contractually obligated to love "Bohemian Rhapsody" as well, but I could write a whole blog post on my experience with that song, so we'll discuss that another day. Yes, I've grown to like the song, but the previously mentioned three songs are the ones I had a stronger connection with growing up. And that's the thing. Queen's discography of legendary music is so vast that everyone has been influenced by them in one way or another. So obviously everyone's going to be excited for a biopic of the band, which is why it destroyed at the box office with a $51.1 million opening domestically.

But what if I told you that I wasn't all that pumped about it? Would you charge my apartment with torches and pitchforks in hand and try to burn me at the stake? If so, then so be it. Because it's true. While it's true that I like the idea of a Queen biopic, especially since frontman Freddie Mercury is one of the most fascinating individuals in music history, I'm a bit weary of movies that went through development hell in order to get to the big screen. Because, yeah, they've been working on this since 2010. Initially it was supposed to star Sacha Baron as Freddie, but he left in 2013 due to creative differences and the project then sputtered out for a few years until Rami Malek jumped on in 2016. Even then, Brian Singer was brought on as the director, but got fired last December for multiple reasons. Dexter Fletcher was hired to finish the project and finally got it done, but I was getting the feeling that the movie might arrive feeling a bit bandaged up with all the different cooks in the kitchen fighting over it. On the Brian Singer note, if you saw the movie and are confused as to why he's still listed as the director in the credits, it's some sort of weird Directors Guild of America thing that helped him retain sole directing rights while Fletcher got an executive producer tag.

Yes, it's true that there's a lot of situations where movies had production issues, but the final product ended up being fantastic. "World War Z" is my favorite example of that. It still doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to be nervous when I hear all of this. That, and when the trailers dropped, I didn't think the trailers were edited together very well. Instead of picking just one Queen song to feature, they tried to cram in as many Queen songs as they could over some randomly thrown together footage of the band doing things. I was a bit confused as to what this movie was going to be or what the specific focus was, which is what I usually expect from a musical biopic, but we'll get to that in a bit. Finally, the critics reviews came in very mixed, which wasn't encouraging to me. On that note, let's take a quick Rotten Tomatoes 101 crash course. Many audience members have slammed the critics for hating this movie, yet the movie ended up with a 60 percent score. A score in the single digits or teens means the critics hated the movie. A 60 percent score means that 60 percent of critics, over half of them, enjoyed the movie. The best label there is to say they were mixed. In fact, I would say that any movie that gets 40 to 70 percent would qualify as mixed reviews.

Maybe it's the movie critic in me, but I would really appreciate it if people could stop saying that critics don't matter or that their opinions are pure trash, especially when a majority of them actually approved of this movie. Granted, it would be nice if Rotten Tomatoes had less of a black and white system that didn't label a movie rotten whenever it got below 60 percent. Allow for some gray area between 40 and 70 percent so that ignorant people don't throw a fit whenever a movie they like isn't certified fresh. But still, if people can learn how to properly interpret Rotten Tomatoes's slightly broken system, that would be nice, too. It's not rocket science. With that rant out of the way, I honestly think the critics have every right to be mixed when it comes to this film. Sure, they always have that right, but I especially think that's the case here because mixed is exactly what I felt. Now if you are one of the many people who praised the movie as one of the best things since sliced bread and you get mad at me for "hating the movie," then I'm going to find you and slap you in the face because that means you ignored these last two paragraphs. I don't hate this movie. There's a lot to praise about it. But there's also a lot of things that frustrated me.

Before we dive into all the movie's historical inaccuracies, allow me to first paint the timeline of what the movie attempted to portray. The movie starts out in the year 1970, right before the band was formed and continues all the way until 1985 when they performed at the Live Aid concert. That's a large chunk of time to cover in just two hours, thus a movie that attempts such a feat needs to have a good team of writers on board who can creatively keep my interest. Unfortunately, though, rather than the movie having a good, solid story arc, this is a movie that didn't really have a specific focus. They tried to tell everything about Queen from beginning to end, which resulted in them rather monotonously jumping forward on a straight timeline, moving from the creation of one big hit to the next. There didn't seem to be an end goal in mind or one theme that the movie wanted to focus on, thus the narrative of the film started to quickly bore me. On top of that, there wasn't a whole lot of drama in the movie. Freddie joining the band was pretty easy. The relationship with his girl happened without him really trying. They gained popularity right away without working too hard and just wrote songs and performed concerts. That was our movie for the first half and I was unimpressed.

Yes, it's true. I love Queen. Because of that, I thoroughly enjoyed the music in this movie. The individual scenes of them creating the songs was entertaining enough. I enjoyed it when they were creating "Bohemian Rhapsody." That was a fun sequence. When they came up with the ideas for "We Will Rock You" or "Another One Bites the Dust," that was fun to see and I certainly enjoyed it when the performed it on stage in front of a loud audience. In fact, I saw this movie in 2D IMAX, so the large screen and great sound did a great job of enhancing the experience. If all you're concerned with is having good music and good performances, then that very well might be enough to please you. You can turn off your brain and enjoy a bunch of Queen concerts strung together and be pleased with the final results. But if you care about story and narrative, then it's possible you might be a bit disappointed because the story here isn't as strong as a could've been and the narrative wanders off in a bit of a freestyle instead of being tight and focused. Yes, this is a common theme when it comes to music-related films for me, whether it be a musical biopic or a straight-up musical. A lot of people only care about the music itself. While that's important to me, I need the story to work.

The whole time I was watching this movie, there's one movie that jumped into my mind as a prime example of a musical biopic done right. That movie is the Beach Boys biopic "Love & Mercy." If you've never heard of that movie, I wouldn't be that surprised. It was a smaller, independent film released in the summer of 2015 that only made $12.6 million total and maxed out at 791 theaters. So it kind of flew in under the radar. But it's this exact style of movie, except the focus isn't on showcasing the entire career of the Beach Boys while making sure to cram in the creation of every major hit they had. The focus was on Brian Wilson and his personal struggles with psychosis that impacted everyone around him. It was a beautifully crafted character study with a brilliant story arc behind it that just so happened to feature some music from the Beach Boys. I feel "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the opposite. The goal seemed to be on the music and the band with Freddie Mercury's journey being more of a footnote. There's also plenty of other movies that came to my mind, but the most obvious one is last month's "A Star is Born." While the specific story is fictional, again the focus is on the story and the characters, not the music.

I want to stress that the structure of the movie is what bothered me when in left the theater. However, there is another element to this movie that must be brought up because it comprises the experience for me once I learned about it. And yeah, this requires spoilers, so you've been warned there. But this movie is a big lie. Yes, I know. When you're making a biopic, there's times where you have to have some creative liberties to make things work. But this movie's portrayal of the events are completely false. Now there's a lot of small things that are inaccurate that don't bother me that much like how he joined the band, how he met the girl, and how in reality they went through several bass guitarists before settling on John Deacon. But the crux of the drama in the second half of the movie involves Queen breaking up, Freddie Mercury learning he has AIDS, and the band reuniting in dramatic fashion right before the Live Aid concert, using that as their reunion. All that is false. The band didn't break up. They took a bit of time off in 1983, but it was mutual and they stayed in contact. They even wrote an album in 1984, went on tour, then performed at Live Aid. Freddie Mercury didn't find out he had AIDS until 1987, two years after Live Aid.

Again, even if the movie was perfectly historically accurate, I would've had troubles with the movie itself. It's not like I left the theater raving about how great it was, then came home, learned of its huge inaccuracies, then decided to write a negative review. Given that I'm not a huge Queen aficionado, I actually assumed that the basic outline of events was correct, especially since the surviving band members helped work on the movie, so I also am not one who was angered right away when the events became twisted. But it's really disappointing when I come home and find out the only times where the movie had a high level of drama were instances where said drama was completely fictionalized in order to make the movie interesting. And that's even more disappointing considering the fact that they didn't need to create a fictional story arc to create a great movie about Queen. The material was already there given how fascinating of a character Freddie Mercury was. Just tell that story. The most confusing part of this is that the band helped put this together, but I guess they were fine with the filmmakers changing their story in order to make a good movie? I suppose a similar thing happened with "Straight Outta Compton," so maybe they should've sat this one out.

All in all, the best word to describe "Bohemian Rhapsody" is frustrating. Here we have one of the greatest bands ever formed with some of the world's most iconic music, led by a fascinatingly complex human being in Freddie Mercury, yet the final result is a poor story structure that decides to focus mostly on uneventfully wandering from song to song with little to no drama behind it. When they do decide to make the movie dramatic in the second act, it turns out they scrambled the whole history of the band while flat-out inventing things that didn't happen in order to give us said drama when they could've simply told the real story of Freddie Mercury as is and the movie would've been excellent. There's been some people that have said that this movie needed to be rated R in order for them to do it right. I disagree. A few added f-bombs and some sex scenes wouldn't have inherently fixed the structure of the film. Regardless of rating, what they should've done is zero in on Freddie Mercury and create a great character piece around him. If that means cutting some of the early timeline and ignoring the creation of certain songs, then so be it. But that's not what was done and thus I left the theater feeling a bit underwhelmed. Sorry. My grade for the movie is a 6/10.