Bohemian Rhapsody

True indeed the few factual inaccuracies are only a pain for the hardcore Queen fans. The far bigger general movie going  public is loving it. it is far exceeding expectations for FOX box office wise. On a 52 million budget it will pass 400 million worldwide this coming weekend. to think it will make more money than SOLO a Star Wars movie. Who knew?

It seems like this year's The Greatest Showman then as far as critical reception versus audience reaction.

The other members of Queen were eerily like the real guys.

Meanwhile I think they really overdid the overbite. It distorted the actor's face in a way that Freddie Mercury's was not. Freddie was gorgeous.

Really?  I didn't even know it was him until after I'd seen the movie.  He seemed okay.

Not a racial reference at all. It was a palatable take on Mercury only.

I do not know enough about Queen and its members to know everything that is accurate and everything that is not, but my issue is that one can sense plenty of oversimplification and eradication of nuance, or distortion of inconvenient detail, in order to fit the band's story into a typical band-biopic narrative. The EMI record producer that the members fire says something like, "Formula is effective. Formula works. We'll stick to the formula." For the most part, those words might as well constitute the film's slogan—which is ironic for a band that used rather extreme camp and operatic or vaudeville influences to toy with what otherwise would have been a fairly formulaic post-sixties hard-rock sound. 

Especially after viewing the film for a second time, I find several engrossing and engaging scenes, especially involving Mercury and his wife (or former wife). But Bohemian Rhapsody also glosses over quite a few aspects or gives them short shrift, and I deem some of the decisions to be a bit insulting. For instance, after the movie reveals that the band is going to tour America, the film shows a long shot of the wide-open spaces and a windmill, obviously signifying the vast expanses of the American heartland. Does the movie then need to impose in red-white-and-blue letters "Midwest U.S.A." upon the image? Evidently, the filmmakers did not trust that the viewers could figure out that very basic connection on their own. Using graphic-type to indicate all the various global cities that they were touring is also lazy and lacking for creativity. And although a feature film will often take liberties with historical details, there should be good reason for doing so. What, for instance, is the motivation for suggesting that Queen created "We Will Rock You" in 1980 as opposed to 1977? For someone with some basic knowledge of Queen, such as myself, this kind of inaccuracy can be glaring. I do not have an issue with artistic license, but I might have an issue with artistic license that seems to lack artistic motivation. I mean, what if one made a biopic about The Rolling Stones that suggested—simply for the sake of narrative convenience—that "Satisfaction" came out in 1968 instead of 1965? 

The film covers fifteen years, and I concur that trying to fit fifteen years into two hours requires some compression. But including the credits, the movie actually runs for over 130 minutes, and the better decision, artistically, might have been to just make a film in the 140-150-minute range and draw out more nuances, go into greater depth about such matters as Mercury's apparent shame regarding his heritage (early on, at least), create more naturalism regarding his sexual self-realization, and provide a less formulaic sense of human interaction in certain scenes. Again, some scenes are quite intricate and intimate, but many others suffer from a going-through-the-motions sensibility (including Mercury's first alleged gay encounter). I also wonder why Queen's heterosexual members—apparently everyone aside from Mercury—also tended to write campy songs, or songs that appeared campy. But the film never really addresses that issue. For that matter, why would straight rockers have gone along with the name "Queen" in the first place? Yes, Mercury provides his reasons for choosing the name in Bohemian Rhapsody, but did everyone else just accept it so easily? Before viewing the film, I actually possessed some vague notion that Mercury was not the only gay/bisexual member, but evidently he was the only one. In that case, how did the band's overall output become so campy? Was Mercury's influence that strong, or did that 1970s London-oriented milieu influence the others to consciously or subconsciously embrace such vibes musically? Aside from some indications regarding the recording of Mercury's "Bohemian Rhapsody," the film does not delve into the matter. Instead, it simply shows the other members becoming nonplussed or repulsed when Mercury goes all-out-flamer at the start of the eighties. But what about the overall musical melange and the campy songs written by the other members? Part of the problem is that Bohemian Rhapsody seeks to be both a biopic of the band and a biopic of Mercury, without ideally merging the two ambitions. 

I concur with the original poster about Bohemian Rhapsody being "very middling" yet elevated by its reconstruction of the Live Aid concert in 1985. That long climactic sequence—wonderfully shot (the aerial and tracking shots of the crowd are especially notable), edited, and performed—raises the film to "pretty good" in my opinion, meaning above-average. But for the most part prior to the Live Aid sequence, this biopic is about as standardized as one could imagine. To be sure, even before Live Aid, Bohemian Rhapsody is engrossing and solidly entertaining. But one can also sense that at almost every opportunity, it seeks to shape matters in a standard and safe direction that fits a formula, which is ironic for a biopic about a band that—as I indicated earlier—found a unique voice despite a broadly typical sound. Of course Bohemian Rhapsody covers Mercury's homosexuality or bisexuality in broad strokes, but the more nuanced matters that I have alluded to receive minimal coverage, if any at all.

I am surprised that the film's grosses have been this substantial. Obviously, they speak to Queen's enduring popularity, and commercially-speaking, the movie's middle-of-the-road approach obviously worked. Bohemian Rhapsody's essential conventionality does not make for a remarkable movie (aside from the Live Aid sequences), but it certainly plays to a wide audience. 

Gave it a 6/10 when I first watched it, but it has fallen a bit since I've seen it. It's probably a 5/10 for me right now. It's reasonably entertaining, but it feels like a 'Greatest Hits' collection, just playing popular song after each other, without ever going any further than surface level. They just go from popular song to popular song, not caring if they skip 2 years of the band members' life in which a lot happens. If you're just going for an entertaining movie, you'll probably be pleased. If you're going for anything more than that, you'll probably be at least a bit disappointed. And tbh I didn't find Rami Malek that amazing. He's good, but nowhere near 'Awards level' good for me.