I finally got around to watching Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022)… i procrastinated for so long just because I’m not a biopic person but I watched enough video essays on YouTube and decided to give it a chance.

I think it’s hit or miss.

The editing of course is phenomenal and so is the cinematography. But the fast-paced editing gets tiring after 30 minutes and it’s basically an almost 3 hour music video montage. I can understand if they did this style for the film’s opening or had some musical breaks in the middle of the story structure to keep things moving, but no basically the entire movie is like this one big montage. It should have been used sparingly but Luhrmann does nothing in moderation. 

I’ve never been a big fan of his movies tbh… his style is unique, I’ll say that much but I honestly hated Moulin Rogue! and his take on Romeo + Juliet simply because I couldn’t get invested in his characters. Like most of Luhrmann’s films, it is pretty much style over substance. I watched one video essay which stated that at the end of the movie we still don’t really know who Elvis was and I kind of agree. Because the editing is so choppy and moves us quickly through Elvis’s life almost like a roller coaster at a carnival we never get a sense of who the characters are. We never stay with them long enough to develop an emotional connection to anything happening on screen. There’s a total disconnect because it’s just pretty to look at. Great visuals but no real meaning behind them. There’s really no linear storyline. We witness Elvis’s life through fragmented pieces. 

For example, there’s a scene where his mother collapses on the stairs and dies and we get a quick 5 second dissolve to her lying in an open casket which fades to another 5 second dissolve to Elvis mourning his mother before we jump quickly to the next scene. This scene moves so fast that we can’t even digest what we’re seeing or be able to understand how the loss of his mother devastated him because it’s just a montage and not an actual scene. So I can’t say the screenplay has really great writing. The film seemed to be more focused on making a beautiful looking work of cinema and it is. It’s beautiful on the surface but movies don’t mean anything if you can’t feel an emotional attachment.

As for the positives:

I do like the idea of telling the story through Col. Tom Parker’s perspective. That was pretty creative. You almost get a Jesus Christ Superstar treatment, seeing Elvis as some mythical figure. They expertly hide his identity at the beginning of the film because it is being told through Col. Tom Parker’s POV. In this way we get an unreliable narrator. Elvis’s introduction is well done.

I love that Austin Butler does his own singing. He really does embody elvis and the casting here was on point. The soundtrack is great.

I do like the film having a more fantasy/ musical approach as opposed to being a straight up biopic. But I feel like if we took the editing of this movie and applied it to something with more of a coherent narrative it would have been a really good film.

I give it a C+ for effort. They recreated some historical moments really well. The costume/ hair/ make up department outdid themselves, not just on Elvis’s wardrobe but the extras looked great, too. Also nice to see some well-played cameos of B.B. King, Sister Rosetta Tharpeand Little Richard.

Stunning visuals overall but really lackluster screenplay that needed more work to make me care about the story and characters.

It was like watching a 2 hour and 40 minute music video with very minimal story.

I give it a 7.5/ 10 stars.