Here’s my “Quick and Dirty Review” of “Yesterday.”
A great film for Beatles fans, and fun to see people discovering their songs for the first time, but the love story seemed too contrived and unearned. I'm not sure 20 years in the friend-zone can ever be overcome. Can it? And while I loved the "alternate-ness" of this reality, the film itself left me with too many unanswered questions about how this alternate reality came about. I wanted to know "why" no one remembers the Beatles or any of the other things that are missing in this reality. Haven't cigarettes been around forever? And Coca Cola started in the late 1800s--does that mean the power outage somehow affected things that happened decades ago? Centuries?
Sorry, I'm the kind of viewer who wants answers. To me, there's no worse cop-out than when a writer or filmmaker leaves an ending "open to interpretation" or expects the viewer to "come up with his own answers." That's not how storytelling is supposed to work--when I write a book, I have an ending in mind. If I didn't, and left it ambiguous, my readers would howl and downvote me on Amazon. So pick and ending and support it with your arguments. Anyway, sorry about the rant. I wanted to like this film, but I kept waiting for the real Beatles to show up and claim their work. I wanted answers, but the way the filmmakers left things open-ended seemed less satisfying for me.
Watch it for the music and Himesh Patel's amazing, heartfelt performance, and ignore the trite, unearned love story angle and Kate McKinnon's thirty-ninth over the top performance. Oh, and WATCH IT FOR LILY JAMES, who makes this movie worth watching. Just barely. 5 out of 10.
