Yesterday is an endlessly frustrating waste of a great premise which spends two hours yelling at you “THE BEATLES ARE GREAT!” without never exactly explaining why. Musician Jack Malik is looking for a lucky break until an accident (somehow) results in a world where the Beatles never happened, and he is the only person who can remember the songs. Ergo, he becomes immensely famous through passing the songs off as his own. Jack only feels a twinge of guilt for his actions or fear of being found out every so often, a feature underutilised. The idea of Jack being plagued by symbols of the Beatles, and the members themselves, is passed off for a joke, but is something that could actually be quite interesting to see aside from a quasi-interesting romantic main-plot. When it finally remembers - oh yes, this is a film about The Beatles! - the songs hold no greater significance than just being good songs, or fodder for jokes. The only joke in this film I laughed at revolved around ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, mostly because of it’s sheer ridiculousness. The script is seriously poor, simply parroting Beatles references, promoting the reason why the first rule of scriptwriting is ‘tell don’t show’. Everything about this film seems to require a second draft.
The main issue - of which the product is never entertaining enough to distract you from it - is that the logic of a world without the Beatles has hardly been thought through, resulting in a ‘alternative reality’ making the whole idea of the film proving rather dull. The world where the Beatles exist, and the one where they don’t, are pointlessly indistinguishable. So much of the pop culture referenced in this film, from Coldplay, The Beach Boy, David Bowie - was undoubtedly influenced by the Beatles. James Taylor is mentioned, an artist who owes his break to Apple Records: created by you know who. It’s not a fan being sycophantic - the Beatles had an impact on pop music so huge it was incalculable, and without them the pop charts would look extremely different. Instead of a reality boringly familiar, save for one band, not go a tad overboard and depict a depressingly grey loveless world, where radios play no music, nobody makes an album, and hardly anybody owns a musical instrument? At least that’d be fun to see, as Jack’s songs leave to a complete societal revolution. But no, you get the gaudy romantic subplot you’ve seen hundreds of times before.
It is also a film firmly stuck in the past glories of Curtis rom-coms - and whilst there are small moments that work, and are subsequently deeply affecting, for what they say about the power of the Beatles - the Yellow Submarine section, namely - it speaks volumes that Ed Sheeran is in this film. That alone is enough to point out Beatles fanatics are not the target audience. The absolute cheek to even imply Ed could hold a candle to the Fabs is enough of an insult. Ed Sheeran’s simply atrocious acting is a stain upon this shitrag. Every smug interjection, quip leaves you begging, pleading for him to go away. Curtis is better than this. He’s certainly better than obviously utilising the not just outdated, but plain wrong assumptions of what women like about the Beatles, believing it’s intended audience isn’t interested in the musical value of the Beatles’ music, more good looks, extreme gushiness, something to scream at. It’s a date film. It may be difficult to say something new about the Beatles, but there’s no point giving the due attention a brilliant premise deserves, your characters any observations, or any reverence to the music you’ve paid millions to include in the film, when you just want it to be something to watch before a couples’ Pizza Express dinner. There’s nothing wrong with a good date film, but this can’t even stretch itself to be a good date film. Hell, an Oasis song holds greater personal gravitas for Jack than anything the Beatles ever did.
As Jack moves up in the music business world, with busybodies making every creative decision for him in the name of profit, you may begin to recognise that the music of The Beatles could not work (!) and take off in today’s manufactured, conglomeratic climate of pop music, orchestrated by stiff men in suits, with no room for the experimentation the Beatles thrived on. You may find yourself shouting at the screen when Jack laments ‘how can I be creative when I’m never left alone’. This is, yet again, a far more interesting little facet to the story rather than the cookie-cutter rom-com we’re given. Unlike Jack’s, their success did not just happen overnight. Yesterday could’ve explored the changing conditions of success in pop music, and even how a lot of the Beatles’ success was due to a variety of external factors - from skiffle groups, post-war feeling, to the available of hallucinogenics - all having absolutely no impact on this premise. The Beatles are a group adored universally for their irrepressible plucky burst of personality, glowing with a charm none of this film has. A complete waste of potential, Yesterday low serves The Beatles as something they never were, or have ever been: unimportant.
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