The Story of Queen

Rating: 6/10 (7 November 2018)

Yep, this is the story of Queen, or at least the story from when they first came together as a band to their performance at Live Aid, which is apparently gone down as one of the greatest rock performances of the modern era. Me, I'm not so sure but then again I wasn't there, and even if I did watch it, I was too young to remember, except that I was made to go to be by my parents because I had to get up and go to church in the morning, and while I did catch a glimpse of the Phillidelpia set the next morning, they seemed to have more pressing issues than me watching a rock and roll extravaganze. Hey, at least my parents let me watch some of it, so that is saying something.
Well, the story is pretty interesting, though to be honest with you, it really isn't all that much different to what you would get from the story of most other rock bands. You know, sex, drugs, rock and roll and all that, or at least where Freddy Mercury is concerned. In fact it seemed as if the other members of the band were actually a lot more straight laced than Freddy, having families and all that. Yet Freddy is the face of the band, the guy who is basically an entertainer, and boy did he know how to pull off a stage performance. I guess that is why Adam Lambert fits in so well with what remains of the band these days (John Deacon has basically called it quits, though Roger Taylor and Brian May still travel about).
So, while the movie is about the band, in many ways it is also about Freddy. A guy who probably didn't fit in all that well with the people around him, namely because everybody saw him as a Packie, yet from that first performance when he stunned the university crowd, to that day at Live Aid where he literally stunned the world, there was a guy who really seemed to be able to live it up.
Yet it is also a story of how many of these rockers live fast and die young, and comparatively speaking, Freddie did die rather young, namely due to the aids virus, which is kept secret from the world until the day before he died. Mind you, that last album of theirs, Made in Heaven, is pretty depressing, as a friend, and a big Queen fan himself, admitted. I guess with me A Kind of Magic was probably their last great Album, though The Miracle did have a couple of good tracks on it, as did Innuendo. In fact, I believe the Kind of Magic tour was basically the last tour that they were able to perform, with Freddy really entering the final stages of the disease - back in those days it didn't matter how much money you had, Aids was a death sentence.
Yet I'm sure that Freddy hadn't taken the moustache look when they had written We Will Rock You, and sure enough when I go to You Tube and play the original clip he hadn't. The other thing was that there was no mention of the video clip that they had produced to promote their song Bohemian Rapsody, and honestly, from what I have heard, that song actually propelled the whole idea of the video clip into the main stream - before that it was just bands playing on live studio sets.
Look, I'm going to say that I did like the film, but in the end, despite me being a huge Queen fan (even though I only own two of their albumns, and one of them is a Greatest Hits Album - where did all the others go), this is still basically a biography of a band, and the only reason I went to see it was, well, because it was Queen.