When I was a kid, my sister and I had a Saturday morning ritual with my Dad. We would run our weekly errands and he would stop along the way at some point at Dunkin Donuts and us to a coffee and a colorfully iced sprinkled donut. These mornings were also filled with one thing that has stuck with me all these years: classic rock. My dad would play hits from all the greats like Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and, being the proud born and raised Jersey girl I am, a lot of Springsteen. But my earliest memory of a classic rock song that stuck out at me as a kid and still to this day is Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” It’s a song that the six or seven-year-old kid and her four-year-old sister could clap along with in their car seats while her dad belted out the lyrics along with the legendary Freddie Mercury. And “We Will Rock You” is just the tip of the iceberg for the music that Queen graced society with. So when the trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody came out in mid-July, I made a promise to my dad that we would wait until Thanksgiving break to see it together. And sure enough, we did. And we were far from disappointed.
I could talk about what made this movie so great for forever. The actors’ performances, the music, and the way viewers saw the band come together as a family are just a few reasons as to why this movie is worth your while. And the bands two founding members, Brian May and Roger Taylor, were executive producers and were very involved in the making of this biopic.
I’m going to start with the band’s performances first. Ben Hardy (Roger Taylor), Gwilym Lee (Brian May), and Joseph Mazzello (John Deacon)’s performances of the band were incredible. All three actors mentioned in interviews with Fandango that they were already big fans of the band and were incredibly honored to not only portray the members of Queen, but to work under them which made the roles even more special. Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury stole the show though. Queen’s lead guitarist, Brian May stated to People Magazine that Malek’s performance as the band’s legendary front man should not only be nominated for an Oscar, but that he was so believable as Mercury, he had the former guitarist and drummer forgetting that Malek was not actually Freddie Mercury when in character. Between the costumes, stage presence, the “hysterical queen” attitude, the overbite and thick British accent, and half microphone used on stage, saying Rami Malek’s performance was spot on from start to finish would be an understatement.
Next, the authenticity. Malek, Hardy, Lee, and Mazzello were all very upfront when casted as the band that they had no musical/performing backgrounds. That might’ve bothered some but made me love the movie even more. The music in the movie were all original live recordings of Queen while they were touring and in studio, including the twenty-minute reunion set from Live Aid in 1985. While some of the footage from that historical concert was made for the film, aerial shots and frames taken with large crowds were actually from the concert, depicting fans who actually attended the event at Wembley Stadium in London.
As a fan of classic rock and music in general, I can’t recommend this movie enough. Even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself a fan of the band or a fan of classic rock, you leave the theater with such an appreciation for what Queen did for rock as a genre and music as a whole. Being a group that experimented with other genres of music within rock such as opera, show tunes, and pop, they were a band that pushed the envelope without breaking it. They were a group that wanted to be different than everything else on the radio and were not afraid to do so by experimenting with different varieties of music along the way. Because of bands like Queen, artists today push boundaries within their own genres and are not afraid to fuse what they can to get the sound that they are looking for. So much of the music we know and love and listen to on repeat was inspired by the legacy that Queen left for music fans all around the world.
HC xoxo,
Annie