Bohemian Rhapsody is the movie every Queen fan was hoping would be made in the sense it documents the life of Freddie Mercury and his time with the world-famous band. For a movie, it delivers on being a story which is worth the price of a cinema ticket, but as a media piece based on someone’s life, there’s a very strange sense to the movie — that none of it is real.
Chronicling the events from where Mercury joins to bad up until Live Aid, Bohemian Rhapsody is a story you would expect from the trailers — one of love, betrayal and rock ’n’ roll. It’s a fun two hours and you will be interested to see what happens to each of the characters. All of them are appropriately developed and none feel under-done. There is a slight cyclic nature to the film with how they come up with new songs being largely the same set of events, but it doesn’t by any means get boring.
However, the tone of the film is where I take issue. The film has a consistent theme of what can only be described as drama — every action appears to be very high stakes in the music industry — but mixing this with the occasional song seems to lighten the mood to the point where a very subtle feeling of fantasy is introduced. At no point in the film will you ever say “did they really do that?”, because the tone of this film has you believing it’s just a fictional movie. I don’t think that’s what the directors were going for and it’s a shame it’s played out this way. I don’t think the songs necessarily make the film worse (they inject some much-needed music for a film about a band). but directors should be weary in the future of how they use music in films.
Overall, as I find myself saying every time I review a movie, this film is a good time and is worth an evening to go and see. But there’s something just lightly off with Bohemian rhapsody that prevents it from being the masterpiece this film deserves to be.
Written by Brian Terry.
Brian Terry is a film reviewer for URYSpeech and also works on the Culture Show. In his free time he enjoys hiking and salsa dancing.
