Misleadingly titled "Bohemian Rhapsody;" should've been "Mercury."

Rating: 4/10 (26 February 2019)

I'm a guitarist and a huge fan of Queen. I took my mom to see them when I was 19 because they are part of what truly defines classic rock to me. It's classical. Anyone from the 60s who made timeless epic ballads of rock was classically trained, including everyone in Queens band.
This movie is called Bohemian Rhapsody after what is surely their most successful song. However, the movie should have just been called Mercury, because it wasn't about anyone else. Freddie Mercury is the vehicle in this movie for which we get to be exposed Queen, but we don't learn anything at all about the band mates and their personal lives who, as reinforced by the movie, played just as big of a role in making the music and the performance as Freddie Mercury did. The movie doesn't explore how the band mates really meet. Just how Freddie Mercury comes to know Brian May and Roger Taylor. Never mind that Brian May was both an Astrophysicist and voted the 7th greatest guitarist of all time, 2 fields feats that require enormous dedication and attention to detail, yet the movie only lightly touches on his capabilities as a musician.
Overall, everything about this movie is larger than life. I thought the acting and shooting of the movie were superb. But it wasn't a movie about Queen, it was a movie about Freddy Mercury, and while the man is likely to be one of the most influential figures of all time, giving him such a stature of omnipotence really shortchanges the movie. The story does somewhat touch on the fact that Mercury needs queen and Queen needs Mercury, but it doesn't feel like it.
This would be like making a movie called "Stairway" and us only seeing the life of Robert Plant and attrinuting all of Led Zeppelin's success to him, and not to the other classically trained musicians in his band Bonham, Paige, or Simon. I put off watching this movie for fear that it wouldn't give a wholistic look at Queen in favor of "giving the 'fans'" what they want, not genuine lovers of Rock and it's history.
At 23, this movie should really appeal to me, but as a musician, it does not. How could you make a movie and not have the musicianship of the entire band at the forefront of this film? It was a let down for me.