One of Disney+'s latest additions sheds a lot of new light on the Beatles during one of the most fascinating moments in the band's career. The Beatles: Get Back resurfaces 50-year-old footage of the band fighting, laughing, and creating classic songs off the cuff. It also shows an iconic, 40-minute performance in full.
However, not everybody is completely happy with the fly-on-the-wall documentary. Between criticizing the band ' choices, being dissatisfied with the footage restoration, and being unhappy with the eight-hour length, Redditors have some hot takes about the rock doc.
Get Back Should Have Screened In Theaters
As was the case with so many Disney movies this year, Get Back went straight to Disney+. However, though movies like Soul were made with the intention of being released in theaters, that wasn't the case with the long-awaited documentary.
Nevertheless, Demafrost would have preferred to see it in cinemas, arguing that "it would have been nice to watch with a like-minded audience." While that is a good point, the doc is broken up into three parts because it's almost eight hours in length. It's just not logistically possible to release it into theaters, and even if there was a truncated version of the documentary, it would have lost a lot of its magic.
Get Back's Video Quality Is Awful
Before even getting to work on carving out a narrative of the footage recorded in 1969, and way before editing everything together in a way that fits that narrative, Jackson had to "de-grain" the bulk of the footage. Notelu isn't a fan of the approach Jackson took to the 1960s footage, claiming that "most of the footage seems to have this greenish-blue tint over it."
The documentary does have an ethereal aesthetic for this very reason, but it adds to the tone of the three-part series. Between sharpening old images, removing the grain, altering the picture speed where needed, and even recreating missing frames, lost footage has never looked this good.
The Beatles' Rooftop Concert Was A Bad Decision
Arguing more that the Beatles' decision is wrong rather than criticizing a part of the documentary, alex7stringed believes that the band shouldn't have performed on the rooftop. It was the big climax of the documentary, but the Redditor wrote, "The concert was half-assed and the location was not worthy of the last public Beatles performance."
Though it might be disappointing from the standpoint of it being the last time the band performed in public together, the rooftop concert was unique and an instantly legendary moment in the band's history. People take big, grandiose live events for granted these days, but back in 1969, what the Beatles did was unprecedented. They made weird live performances the new normal, and it's part of why they were such an inspiring band.
George Was Right To Quit The Beatles
At the end of the first part of the documentary, tensions between the band rise when John Lennon accuses George Harrison of vamping. That term is used in music when somebody repeats the same short sequence of chords over and over again. Not long after, George quits the band, and digable_planets1 sides with George on the matter.
The Reddit argues that "his performance of 'I Me Mine' was incredible and it barely got a reaction." To be fair to the , the solo performance was one of the musical highlights of Get Back. However, the reason he left was more out of jealousy of Paul and John's relationship than anything, or at least that's how the documentary made it seem.
The Repetition In Get Back Is Frustrating
In true Peter Jackson fashion, there is so much footage used in the documentary, and it seems like, if he could, he would have included all 60 hours of footage that he had to rummage through. At eight hours long, it's any Beatles superfan's dream.
However, documentaries about the music industry. Each performance sees the band hone a the song into the classic it would become, and it's eye-opening to watch a band with such a legacy status put together a song piece by piece.
Get Back Is Too Long
Watching the band focus on fine-tuning each song for hours is almost therapeutic, but konajinx thinks it could have been a lot shorter. The Redditor mentions that "it was a bit too long for me and I had to break it up in chunks," but it was broken up perfectly into three parts.
Being eight hours in length, each part of the documentary ends at the perfect point. The first part ends with George leaving the band, and the second part ends on the cliffhanger of what they're going to do for their live performance, making it almost episodic and easily digestible for viewers.
The Beatles Would Have Been A Shoegaze Band With Yoko In The Lead If George Didn't Return
Almost in jest, nadiacartel reckons that the band was on the cusp of becoming an experimental shoegaze band with Yoko Ono fronting the band. The Redditor weighs in by questioning, "who knew that George was the only thing stopping them?"
George briefly quitting the band was bittersweet. On the one hand, it influenced some of the funniest Get Back memes. And on the other hand, it led to Yoko singing in her unique, dissonant style while the three remaining Beatles played in the background. But given his perfectionist work ethic, there's no way Paul McCartney would have ever allowed any of that to be put on to wax.
The Beatles Aren't Happy In Get Back
There have been loads of Beatles documentaries, but so few of them have gone into greater detail over the inner turmoil and the crumbling relationships within the band. However, if anything, the documentary documents the healing process that the band went through while recording Let It Be. But Plibted thinks it was much worse than it seems, saying that "anyone who tries to claim that this doc shows how happy the sessions were is trying to push an agenda."
During the recording process, the band aired their grievances and forgave one another, and they couldn't have looked happier on the rooftop. Not long after the recording of the album, they broke up because they wanted to pursue other projects, but that's only natural.
Get Back Should Have Focused More On Other Songs
With the documentary showing the band spending so much time fine-tuning several of the songs on Let It Be, gotele thinks there should have been a focus on some of the other songs. The "would have liked to have seen more from 'Dig it.'"
While the uncut studio version of that song is longer than 15 minutes, there's a reason why the album version is whittled down to just 50 seconds. And outside of that, so many songs are from Let It Be are the subject of so much attention in the documentary, along with many songs from Abbey Road too.
Viewers Need To Know About The Beatles' History Before Watching Get Back
Given the fact that the documentary takes place in 1969, 15 years after The Beatles formed and chronicling the recording of their last album, there's a lot of history that doesn't get told. drdax2187 thinks that potential viewers need to read up on that history before watching.
They argue that viewers "definitely need to know a good bit about the band's history before going in." However, as long as audiences know how influential they were, there isn't much that the documentary doesn't fill people in on. And there's a fairly broad montage of the history at the beginning of part one.