I'll juts be here waiting for a standalone Freddie Mercury biopic.

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2019)

Bohemian Rhapsody is the title of a song of one of the world's biggest band in the world, Queen, and now the title of their biopic starring Rami Malek as the lead singer Freddie Mercury. While I'm sure we've heard of the band and their songs, for someone like me who grew up around Pop music, I know some of their songs but nothing about the band altogether so I was looking forward to watching this. The same way I only know of Elton John via the Lion King soundtrack, it would be interesting to see 'Rocketman' this year, directed by Dexter Fletcher who took over for Bryan Singer for this film when the latter was fired by the studio for being unprofessional. This may partly explain why Singer wasn't nominated for Best Director, although it could also be because the movie in my opinion failed to capture the larger-than-life figure that was Freddie Mercury.
As far as biopics go, Bohemian Rhapsody followed the formula very well, showing us their humble beginnings, their rise to fame, personal struggles, failures and eventual redemption culminating in their legendary performance for LIVE AID in 1985. Rami Malek was marvelous portraying the flamboyant lead singer, right off the bat when you see him a few minutes in as he goes onstage, even with his back to the camera but he was already conveying so much and you can say that is what acting is. There's a clip in Youtube showing a side-by-side comparison of Queen's LIVE AID performance and the adaptation in the movie and some sequences will give you chills for it's striking resemblance. As for his chances to win the Oscar? Slim to none, first because there were some parts in their famous performance where he seemed conscious and trying hard, second, he is playing a gay character and third, he is of Egyptian descent so it will depend on how diverse the voting committee is otherwise Rami will have to be content that he gave justice to the role and will be the benchmark of future Freddie Mercury adaptations. The rest of the cast were solid, especially Gwilym Lee who looks uncannily like Brian May.
When I said earlier that the film failed to honestly portray Freddie Mercury, it is based on the fact that they took way too many liberties in their adaptation, mostly in favor of the living members who had control of what goes in and what doesn't. While in good faith they deemed this necessary, it is biased towards their point of view and might not be what actually happened. Especially in scenes where only Freddie was involved, who was known to be a very private person so most of the input for him was only based on secondhand accounts and might not really be what Freddie would've done in the situation. They had to balance out his over-the-top persona with how they want the band to be known by the new generation and how they want to be remembered by the older one. That's not necessarily bad per se, but in turn they contained what we know of Mercury to so little that you leave the movie feeling deprived, but piqued enough to Google, Youtube and Spotify them. So while this may not win for Best Picture, it's a win that they got a good movie out all things considered.