[Movie Review] - Yesterday

The basic premise of this movie is that this guy wakes up and discovers that (almost) everyone else in the world has never known the Beatles. He's a struggling singer-songwriter, so he starts singing their songs and releasing them as his own.

The thing I had trouble with in this movie is that I'm not a huge Beatles fan (When people ask if I'm a Beatles or a Stones person, I answer with Led Zeppelin). This movie asks you to believe that the world would be much worse off if the Beatles never existed. I don't buy it. I know they were hugely influential, and you can never know for sure, but at this point they're part of a bygone era. I can't imagine that there would be less love in a world lacking the Beatles. Someone else would have stepped up and filled that gap.

The other problem with this is that the world in practice seemed basically the same. But they kept saying that the world was worse. I would have preferred if they showed us how it was worse, rather than using it as a lazy narrative device.

Certainly, some of the Beatles' songs are timeless. But some of them ("I Saw Her Standing There", for example) simply wouldn't fly today. Cultural and entertainment standards have changed dramatically, so if you dropped some of their songs on the world in 2019, I don't believe it would resonate in the same way. They played with this a little bit in the movie, but it was more as a vehicle to poke fun at the music industry.

Overall, it was an entertaining movie, but I just couldn't get past the required suspension of disbelief. It's probably my own hangup. If I were a huge Beatles fan, I would probably have liked this much more.