Bohemian Rhapsody

Queen was, ironically, considered the king of music during the mid-1990s, with their phenomenal music still being played and remembered to this day, and the man himself, Freddy Mercury, still held in the hearts of many even after his untimely death in 1991. In the year 2018, Hollywood finally realized the easy money it would receive from making a movie based on the flamboyant pop star, and so Bohemian Rhapsody was born. Made as a biographical movie of the pop star, Freddy Mercury (played by Rami Malek) is a young man with less than appealing teeth who because of them, is able to have the most heavenly voice. Teaming up with two rock-stars in prep, Bryan May and Roger Taylor (played by Gwilym Lee and Ben Hardy), they set off to become the most famous band in the world. Growing in popularity and taking on the band name of Queen, Freddy starts to fully be encompassed by the life of celebrities; discovering his homosexuality which starts to cause problems with his wife, Mary Austin (played by Lucy Boynton), his slow deception by his manager Paul (played by Allen Leech) which pushes him further away from the band and more into a life of drugs and whoring, and discovering he has aids right before the biggest stage show of his life, Life Aid.  Tackling a lot of complicated problems that he will need to come to grips with now that he is actually dying, the film follows Freddy Mercury in this clearly ”true story” from the small boy wonder to worldwide sensation. The movie was heavily bombarded with Oscar nominations and critical and audience praises left and right, earning big numbers at the box office and created a new spark of musical biopics that would highlight famous musical stars around the Academy Award season. In the general sense, its positive reception does have warrant with some great actors, brilliant visual editing and shot composition, and enough Queen music to lull the audience into an entertained state. However, the film does suffer from lackluster writing, poor pacing and above all else, makes the life and story of Freddy Mercury come across as boring, arguably failing at its crucial element and making the film as a whole incredibly unbalanced.

Even though this film was very popular, a lot of critics were very vocal about the elements they weren’t entirely fond of and the story, written by screenwriter Anthony McCarten, and Peter Morgan, is where most of the real criticisms comes into play. Reconstructing the life of Freddy Mercury after his death couldn’t have been the easiest task to handle as it had to avoid stepping on the toes of anyone that may be offended if they handled a part of his life incorrectly, considering how popular Mercury was and still is as a musical icon. Unfortunately, the truth is that a majority of the movie is made up to fit into this Hollywood mold set for most real-life biopics, which explains the bountiful amount of familiar cliches scattered around throughout this movie which become even more frustrating when you realize they exist in place on actual events. Most real-life stories have made-up elements to work in Hollywood movies, and that isn’t always awful as long as the spirit and emotional turmoil of the individual is kept in focus, but with that said, this movie isn’t made any better or even more coherent by adding fictitious elements, but instead makes it incredibly boring. The life of Freddy Mercury should be light years more interesting than what was delivered on-screen, basically detailing the narrative of any story about a rock group rising to fame except with Queen at the centre. The film may have taken out some of the more dangerous and risky stuff surrounding his life to keep the fans passive and there are a few obvious altercations that do make it feel more flowing from a cinematic level (like the entirety of the closing performance), but when a real-life story comes off as predictable, especially for such a spontaneous and electric band like Queen, something isn’t right. The directing by Bryan Singer feels very by-the-numbers and even quite bland given the choice of band that he is portraying and the film is paced in such an awkward way that the first half is super rushed and never takes time to develop any characters to a point where anyone can become interesting, than the last half is incredibly slow and feels very underwhelming considering that Freddy Mercury should have an interesting background that this movie never seems to address. When a biopic is coming as across as predictable and is featuring elements that are shown in children’s shows that do this kind of story, it’s clearly not seeing the potential that a truly honest retelling of this man’s life could have been. Both of the film’s writer have had previous work on real-life stories such as The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour, so they should have the right writing style down packed, yet the writing for this film not only feels hoaky, but also slightly lazy in delivery, again leading to very recognizable scenes and dialogue moments.

The characters also suffer from the previously mentioned story issues and don’t come across as effectively as they should. Since the story and writing aren’t given enough time to feel fleshed out and human, that leaves the characters feeling very cartoonishly simple. Freddy Mercury isn’t made into an interesting character in the movie, which feels horribly ironic considering it’s a biography on himself, yet it doesn’t provide much that most people wouldn’t already be aware of. His background is barely focused on nor his family life (which would have provided a different direction that hadn’t been explored before) and his later life shows and tells the audience nothing about him that isn’t obvious from watching him sing; he was a strong performer, incredibly flamboyant, very selfish, and often self-destructive, and highly afraid of being himself. The side characters don’t feel like real people, but rather characters from films and other stories similarly portrayed within this genre and it’s a shame that considering how much you can feel that the people involved wanted to portray Freddy Mercury in a very strong and meaningful way (Queen band manager, Jim Beach, acted as a producer for this film), it doesn’t really show off the rest of Queen in a very memorable light. What saves most of this are the actors themselves, as all of them, whether big or small, are putting in a lot of effort in capturing the spirit and passion of these real life people and everyone does a really good job; Rami Malek is a good Freddy Mercury and fully gets into the role, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy and Joe Mazzello as the other bands members are played well, Lucy Boynton as his girlfriend has some nice moments and feels like one of the few elements that provided something fresh for the genre as well as those who aren’t entirely familiar with Mercury’s life, and other celebrities like Aidan Gillen, Tom Hollander and Mike Myers are appropriate choices for their parts, even if they don’t feel like real people. Even if they didn’t act like them, it is almost uncanny how much effort they put into recapturing the look of the real-life people, it clearly showed a lot of effort from casting director, Susie Figgis, and it seems to have paid off with their good performances.

The technicals behind the movie are what really steals the show as the production team were clearly given the most direction and most help in recreating the spirit of Queen and allowed the most freedom to be a bit more playful in terms of delivery. Since Queen is one of the most famous bands in history, it’s no surprise the music is everywhere, and the movie knows it can bank on them to draw people in. All of these songs are still fantastically catchy and it’s wonderful to hear them once again within the context of their creation, even if they aren’t performed by anyone new and the inclusion is mainly for fan-service and not for actual reasoning (it would’ve been a bit nicer to actually learn the reasoning for some of these songs being made rather than just to see them). Seeing the build-up to how they created the songs, especially Bohemian Rhapsody, while again unfortunately simple and definitely not true, is slightly entertaining, as seeing one of the most memorable unique songs of all time being created does still feel like an occasion in itself. The costuming by Julian Day feels appropriate for the persona of Freddy Mercury, and the ending concert has some surprisingly good build-up and equally cool pay-off, copying the actual live-aid concert almost shot for shot with cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel that does a great job making even mundane stuff look clean and cinematic. For all this films faults and how washed out and steely grey it can feel at times, it does result in the picture looking very clean and polished in many moments, with an overall production design by Aaron Haye that isn’t anything striking but does feel effectively in both how it portrays multiple different time periods and how it shows off each element in a very professional fashion. The best part of this movie is the editing of the shots weirdly enough handled by John Ottman, as the timing and preciseness on some of the scenes in this movie are so tightly woven together and perfectly matched, it feels like a music video which was probably its intent. Some equally nice shots don’t hurt either, mainly coming from the final performance.

Bohemian Rhapsody is fittingly enough very much like the song it named after; its surrounded by conflicting onlookers who will either love it endlessly or hate it endlessly, it doesn’t have that much sense and may seem slightly mindless, but the spectacle and effort behind it clearly has passion and will draw in the right people. While the movie doesn’t quite reach those heights, it still produces an average movie that from the right viewpoint can be pretty enjoyable. The acting is good, the production has a lot of effort and detail put behind it, the cinematography has a very fine margin that is handled beautifully, and it is good to see that this film inspired more music biographical stories to become more mainstream. If the story was written in a more intriguing way that made it feel more realistic, the fabrications weren’t so obviously false, the characters were interesting, and the pace of the story was better handled, it could have been a masterpiece fitting with the band itself. Nothing to go Ga Ga over, but will no doubt satisfy those that love Queen.