This is something that needs to be done right so as to not offend a hug fan base and alienate a lot of people that happened to have loved Freddie Mercury with a passion. The front man and lead vocalist for Queen is a role that can’t be messed up if Bohemian Rhapsody, the title of the movie, is to be a hit. Rami Malek is already a proven actor and as such should be able to pull off such a role, but then again a lot of it comes down to dialogue and what the writers choose to do with the story. If they’re smart they’ll stick to the facts and not fly off the handle by adding or deleting anything that could be critical to the telling. If they do then the chances of anyone buying into this movie could be slim.
It’s already being lauded as more than just a regular biopic since the director wants to go as far as they can into describing Mercury and his musical career without having to focus on too much of the negative aspects. Of course if they don’t focus on them at all it won’t be much of a movie and the risk is that it comes off looking as though they are attempting to show Mercury as only half a character. The entire truth needs to come out if the movie is going to be believable and attract viewers. Audiences this day want something close to the truth if not the actual truth itself, and biopics have a very bad reputation at times of taking the best and most controversial moments of a person’s life and skipping all the rest. This tends to make people that don’t know enough about the individual think that this was the way that things were back in those days.
One of the most noted biopics that got a great many things wrong was Walk the Line, the story of Johnny Cash. This film left a lot people thinking that Cash became a drug addict by choice instead of by other means. It tended to mess up a lot of facts about Cash’s life and made a lot of people believe that he’d gone through a great deal of adversity in the same manner as the movie. While his life was far from perfect and he did in fact suffer his fair share there were too many inconsistencies between the movie and his life to really get into the film.
That’s what needs to be avoided in Bohemian Rhapsody, but in all honesty the likelihood that it will happen is going to be there until people go to see the film. Then they will discover whether or not the truth of the man is going to be presented on film or if he’s going to be another individual whose life is glamorized rather than truthfully told.
Biopics really need to stick to the facts even if it doesn’t make for the type of excitement that Hollywood wants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spiYDYK80NM
