The Frog Chorus

Prismark10

A film full of The Beatles songs cannot really go wrong.

Danny Boyle has made a whimsical fantasy. What if we live in a world where The Beatles did not happen. John, Paul, George and Ringo never amounted to much because they never got together. Gosh it would mean somebody else narrated those early episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is a struggling singer in a small seaside town who is going nowhere. About to call it quits the only person who believed in him is best friend from school, Ellie (Lily James.)

One night when all the lights go out throughout the world, Jack is involved in a bus accident and wakes up in a world where no one have heard of the pop group The Beatles or their songs.

Jack writes the songs from memory and wows the audience with Hey Jude, Back in the USSR, Here Comes the Sun, Yesterday and Let it Be. These songs find an audience for the first time.

Unfortunately Richard Curtis's screenplay takes some interesting ideas and then diverts its attention to a soppy and unnecessary romance. This is a rom-com and you see Jack and Ellie only ever had a platonic relationship so far, all through childhood, to those teenage years when their hormones were raging to the present day. Jack it seems never had a girlfriend and never romanced Ellie, the woman who has always believed in him. Suddenly Jack realises he needs Ellie when she has found someone else.

I would like to have known more about this world that had no Coca Cola, cigarettes and Oasis. The joke about Oasis was funny, a band so influenced by The Beatles, they could never exist if the Fab Four had never happened. Then again without The Beatles there would had been no Bruce Springsteen, The Eagles and Brian Wilson would not have strived so hard to create Pet Sounds. Some young filmmaker called Robert Zemeckis would never had made a movie called 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' It does raise an issue, The Beatles were more than just the songwriting. It was also the music, the harmonies, how they sang and the production by George Martin.

Some ideas are explored such as the music industry sanitising the product they want to sell. The White Album has diversity issues according to a marketing executive. However Curtis goes for the default romance story in the second half which lets it down.

score 6/10

Prismark10 18 September 2019

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5127966/