Good idea, but tangibly under-implemented

Rating: 6/10 (16 November 2019)

The last time Richard Curtis played with sci fi, the result was "About Time" (2013) - a reasonably good and cohesive film, if one that played fast and loose with the old-fashioned "rules" of time travel - despite key characters (played by Bill Nighy and Domhnall Gleeson) maintaining within the world of the film itself that such rules did exist...
Fast forward 6 years, and we have Curtis, Tim Bevan and the Working Title gang, plus Danny Boyle and Jack Barth - and in all of that sea of talent we out here all know for sure that - as a timeline episode of "Dr Who" or "Star Trek", say, this same story would most likely have looked more polished and sharper, and even meant more, precisely because the sci-fi lovers there would have known how to extract most from a "reorganised time stream" story.
For yes - as a great many people know - "Yesterday" asks us to envisage a world in which some cosmic event that briefly puts the lights out globally re-rigs our history in such a way that the group "The Beatles" somehow never got together, and nobody is any the wiser about that sad fact - except our hero Jack (Himesh Patel) and two other people, one of whom is a Russian and the other a Liverpool lass played to very good if brief effect by the ever-reliable Sarah Lancashire.
As the film develops, we in the audience learn along with Jack (in a pretty humorous way) that 4 other key phenomena we know about from our world never made it into existence in the alternate reality that is now being lived by the film characters (but no spoilers offered here on that).
Now sci-fi purists who watch will notice that only one of these 4 has any closer (also quite witty) link with the non-emergence of The Beatles, while the other 3 would - under the strict rules of traditional sc fi - have required re-rigging at several other points in history, some even quite far back. This "eclectic mix" hardly holds up for a purist, but then "Yesterday" is not a sci-fi film, even if it might have done better had it been so.
The key storyline it does have still has a great deal going for it, and the true (momentary) magic of this film - that we can share vicariously - comes with our empathising with people who first hear those glorious fusions of melodies and lyrics the "Fab Four" came up with, often adding that extreme dose of down-to-Earth melancholy. In our own lives, we doubtless happened upon these hits step by step, from an early age, so the power is diminished thanks to the gradual nature of our acquaintanceship. But just imagine if we were all fully-fledged adults and then were exposed to "Eleanor Rigby" and "The Winding Road" and "Let it Be" all at once for absolutely the first time. This the film invites us to imagine, and for brief moments at least a true lump is brought to our throats by it.
Beyond that, we could for example ponder on:

how a non-charismatic person would fare singing the great songs? (hinted at in the film)
how the songs would succeed/not succeed if first introduced 50 years later than they were "supposed to"? (barely hinted at in the film)
how the songs might prove unsuitable for our delicate 21st-century sensibilities? (hinted at in the film)
how the songs might flop if they came into existence with no cultural context, and hence no particular meaning to the person presenting them? (hinted at - as Jack is an Asian from rural Suffolk, who has no link with Strawberry Fields and so on)
how suspicious the world might be of someone producing all of that without any great talent or creative struggle? (hinted at in the film)

Ironically, these are the kind of ideas that come to my mind in the aftermath of seeing the film, but they are my thoughts provoked by the film, rather than notions present (or at least fully-developed) in the film itself - a sure sign that not enough creativity was really shown.
And interesting (not by pure chance) that Ed Sheeran features - quite effectively. For we might really question whether a world that had never contained The Beatles would even be ready for Ed and his ballady style. That also seems quite a worthwhile question.
To be honest, Himesh Patel in the role of an average performer playing down his role all the time at moments perhaps unfortunately begs the question whether the actor himself is really up to this part. And - since we know Lily James can do great things - her also less-large-than-life character seems to be making a trend out of the whole "let's not get too excited here" vibe, and that's a pity.
Ironically, "Yesterday" often seems to play best as an "odd goings on in rural Suffolk" kind of piece, in this way harking back to "Whisky Galore", "The Titfield Thunderbolt", "Passport to Pimlico" and other gently whimsical British offerings of the Ealing Comedy kind. So the fact that this film's universe extends to LA and Moscow looks a little incrongruous, even as these locations are theoretically necessary for the plot development.
The idea that the non-existence of "The Beatles" would not necessarily denote the non-existence of individual band members was one that sci-fi fans could see from miles off, and happily it was one the makers ran with to good effect. Surprising, then, that it was ultimately a lookalike of the late Lennon that we got to meet, rather than the very much alive and kicking in real life Sir Paul or Sir Ringo. Neither actually made it into the film, and maybe that's just as well ... or maybe it's not.
The fact that somebody had this great idea, and that it was given some measure of power in the movie is still something we can be grateful for. But many of us out here are aware how key points that needed making, or could have been made, in the context, were not - and that's a saddish waste of a great opportunity.