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The Beatles Get Back Documentary Review
More observations than a traditional review
As a musician and a fan of The Beatles music, I was excited at the thought of seeing one of the world’s greatest songwriting teams in the studio writing and recording songs. To see some of that magic happen. Needless to say, I was eager to watch Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back.
I knew the history. The Beatles were pretty much sick of each other and tired of being a Beatle at that point (understandably, after spending so many years constantly together in an insane circus of being a cultural phenomenon and incredibly famous.) And that the original Let It Be film focused on the worst parts of the experience (I didn’t see the original movie. I was 10 at the time.)
I wanted to see if Peter Jackson would reveal a more balanced documentary.
Here are my overall thoughts on the series.
The documentary was too long. Jackson showed an excessive amount of the fooling around (which was apparently a lot.) Too much of them playing snippets of non-Beatles music. And too much random conversation.
Perhaps Jackson was trying to set the tone of the experience and show us how tedious, uncomfortable, and unstructured the project often was. If so, it worked. Part One was hard to watch. Part Two…
