Good but many failings

Rating: 6/10 (5 October 2019)

This film starts off well, the 'transition' scene is good and holds you throughout. It makes you realise the significance of the Beatles. How they are going to continue to shape the future. It's not that there are not songs out there just as good. It's the culture they created. An insight into the end of an empire. A lazy, psychedelic, visionary replacement for religion. The music becomes the sacred texts which people in future will return to again and again. Everybody feels it but nobody really knows what any of it means. Best kept that way. It's the voice of pure imagination and vision, beyond literal understanding. This movie puts this across by creating a parallel universe where the Beatles never happened.
The first cover of Yesterday worked brilliantly. It showed what it would be like if someone just picked up a guitar outside a pub and played this amazing song out of nowhere. John Lennon always admitted it was Paul's best song.
However, except for this cover nothing in the movie really does the songs justice. Many covers are just cut short. The version of Help at the hotel fit the story but was atrocious. After the movie I had to go and listen to a whole load of music to make up for what seemed like an appetiser that wasn't satisfied. Including the big hole where Eleanor Rigby didn't happen. But that's normal in such films and I guess it was really a love story, not a musical.
But a downer in the film for me was Ed Sheeran. I find him lacklustre and boring. I have tried listening to his songs but never reach the end. To put this very mediocre musician and singer in a movie about the Beatles was simply a marketing strategy. Of course he would agree to do it. 50 years ago Ed Sheeran would never have been noticed. The standard has fallen so far. Musicology studies have shown this. Apparently young people these days require this familiarity and security in music. When they get older they go back and realise how brilliant this old music is. Hopefully this movie may have purpose in 'educating' them sooner.
There is a scene when they get on Ed Sheeran's private jet that could have been made genuinely funny. Instead it just served to reinforce the impression that Ed is so far above us ordinary folk. It turned out to be so bad that it was hard to watch. Ed cool and rich beyond belief. The main characters bumbling idiots. Yuk. That should have ended up on the cutting room floor. The only bit where Ed Sheeran came close to actually acting was the scene where he admits losing the song writing contest.
What saves the movie in the end are the interactions between Jack and Ellie. In the few films I've seen Lily James in, she has been pretty good. In this she really shone. I will go back and check out some of her other roles.
Don't be put off by this review. I wanted and expected more but I watched it to the end, including the end credits right to the end while Hey Jude played. It is a basic feel good movie, with many failings, but it leaves an impression. 6/10.