Yesterday

2019 musical fantasy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Following an accident, a struggling musician realizes that he lives in a world where the Beatles have never existed. He decides to take advantage of this by "writing" their songs.

It's unclear how somebody can get in an accident that causes everybody else in the world to have amnesia. I don't need the fantasy explained to me exactly, but it would have helped if this was a little less mysterious. This is a case where the premise is better than the movie, that premise winding up under-explored.

This leans very heavily on the charm and talents of Himesh Patel who nails every subdued performance (like when he performs "Yesterday" for a small group of friends) and the big concert moments in front of thousands. He also has a good rapport with Lily James.

This movie has a whole lot of Ed Sheeran and Kate McKinnon. Maybe the former is a bigger deal than I'm aware of. This almost seems like an Ed Sheeran vanity project, a movie that lets the world know that if it wasn't for the Beatles, Ed Sheeran would be the greatest songwriter who ever strummed a guitar. I can't name a single Ed Sheeran song, so maybe I'm missing out. McKinnon is a huge distraction, a character who is absurdly comic. She's there to help form a theme about the music industry, but it's heavyhanded and a little too obvious.

This has some fine moments, but is mostly generic when it should be magical. Part of the problem might be that the film's audience doesn't forget the Beatles and their songs existed. Though those songs have had fifty years to become classics, I don't know if they'd have the same impact if they were introduced to the world in 2019. The dramatic irony forces us to think about what we would do if we were in the character's situation, but the movie is a little too fluffy to really give any of it emotional depth. I rarely felt what I think I was supposed to feel. I just thought, "Heh, what a cute premise."