Is this the real life? Hardly...mostly fantasy.

Rating: 4/10 (4 May 2019)

How it won four Oscars baffles me - made me watch it again to see if I was missing something but I ended up disliking it even more.
Queen was a superstar band with barely any roadblocks, or at least that's how the movie portrayed them. They lost their singer, Freddie comes to the rescue after working a day at the airport and listening to his dad give him advice (which seems so forced I can't help but wonder if they've never even met each other before this scene), and then they all become rock gods. Oh look, the mic's not coming off the stand, but it's okay because everything Freddie touches turns to gold. From that point on, the film just gets worse.
There's no character development at all - we see Freddie loves rock n' roll, disagrees with his dad, and has a family of foreigners (in America). Then suddenly he happens to catch the band while they're moping around the van, and lo and behold, their singer just quit. I don't know if this is actually what happened but if that's the case, Freddie got very lucky - and even so, there's still no struggle, no great conflict.
How to make a bland biopic:
Step 1: Regular part-time job guy reveals hidden talent, gets discovered
Step 2: Regular guy is new, but he's good, and everyone loves him
Step 3: They all get famous and there's a montage of them getting famous
Step 4: They are flawless and perfect and know so much more than the music professionals and radio broadcasters
Step 5: The love interest randomly introduced in the beginning has a falling out
Step 6: Suddenly time passes and conflicts arise
Step 7: But then they all make up and have one last great big show together that blows everyone's socks off.
It's boring.
The romance has zero chemistry.
I think that has mostly to do with Rami's acting. I highly disagree with his Oscar win - I thought he was robotic, had a hard time showing inner turmoil, he was flamboyant in a sanctimonious way, not a likable way. Sometimes he was downright creepy. As if something was off about him. You can't have a character get everything he wanted and then have him be a genius only to treat everyone else like garbage. It doesn't matter if you're brown, black, white - being a minority and/or in poverty and then suddenly making it big doesn't give you a free pass to be annoyingly pretentious. Sometimes a movie does this on purpose in order to convey how naive a character can be - but not here, because it seems that everybody loves Freddie unconditionally. Are we supposed to be rooting against him? Are we supposed to be happy when his life falls apart? I don't think so, so why do I feel that way...?
Every time he opened his mouth there was something poetic flying out and it took away from the realism. You mean to tell me Freddie Mercury was such a genius that every sentence he spoke could have been a line in a song? "You're a fruit fly..." F*ck off. Not everything's a metaphor and not everyone besides the band is an idiot. Example:
"Six Bloody Minutes". Ray Foster: "It goes on forever, six bloody minutes."
Freddie Mercury: "I pity your wife if you think six minutes is forever."
Me: That's hilarious...*rolls eyes* You really got him good. I was waiting for the laugh track (in the rock biopic).
There are two conflicts that Freddie has to deal with: Homosexuality and AIDS.
"I have it. I have AIDS." Okay... Maybe it's a matter of packing too much into the story, but that execution was horrible. Maybe they wanted Freddie to blow past it and get on with his final days. Fine, but this was clearly a significant moment in his timeline, and they just plow right on through to the next scene.
They tackle homosexuality in a similar fashion. Freddie's girlfriend deduces it, Freddie looks like he's heard it for the first time, interviewers barrage him with questions about it...there's nothing groundbreaking. The film is saying, "He's gay and that's a struggle for him but at the same time he's proud of it, and don't really worry about it because he's also in a band and he's got a family, and another family, and a sleazy guy wants to make money off him, and he's sick, and a thousand other agendas we're trying to push here so just forget about all that...next scene!" It's just too much with no substance.
The film focuses on Freddie. The rest of the band are portrayed as lackeys with occasionally good ideas. I didn't like that.
The "villain" was predictable. Sleazy guy wants to make money off of talented guy and split up the family. It's as cliche as it can get. I think I saw the same thing in a Disney channel movie ten years ago. "Is Freddie there?" "Not right now, he's working." We saw him do all but hide in the corner and twist his mustache.
Editing was pretty well-done during the montages, transition scenes, but then you have scenes like when the band first meets their manager, and there's a jump-cut every half-second, sometimes unnecessarily to people who aren't even in the conversation (Manager talks to Freddie, jumps to Brian, Freddie answers him, jumps to John. Um...what?). Not exactly Oscar-worthy in my opinion.
I didn't hate the film. But I do hate the reviews. 10 stars? You're telling me this was perfection in your eyes? Maybe I'm just hard to please...But the plot is excruciating, the message is bizarre (when you're a bad-ass rock and roll band, the one thing that matters is...family? What?) and the writing is confusing and bloated.
Also, Freddie did mad amounts of cocaine while he was working. I didn't see that make it into the film at all.
Is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?