The Beatles: Get Back – does Peter Jackson’s documentary live up to the hype?

Millions of Beatles fans

Millions of Beatles fans worldwide have reason to twist and
shout in celebration as Peter Jackson’s fly-on-the-wall documentary
about the band is finally released. 

The Lord of the Rings director spent two
years editing 55 hours of previously unseen footage and 140
hours of mostly unheard audio to create The Beatles: Get
Back, the first episode of which is out on Disney+.

The three-part docuseries follows 22 manic days in the
lives of the Fab Four in January 1969, when they wrote and
rehearsed songs for their album Let It Be –
originally titled Get Back. The footage is made up of outtakes
from the Beatles’ “glum” 1970 documentary of the same name
that had been kept in a vault for the past five decades,
said GQ.

In an interview with the magazine, Jackson revealed that the
first cut of the new film was 18 hours long, before being trimmed
back to around eight. But does the final version live up to his
promise to show the group “as you’ve never seen them before”?
Critics have begun delivering their verdicts.

The good

The eagerly anticipated film “transcends both the hype and the
fan anxiety” that Get Back “might turn out to be a kind of
Paul-and-Ringo-approved whitewash”, said Owen Gleiberman in
Variety^[1].

Jackson shows The Beatles as “a close-knit group of showman-gods
who never stopped clowning around or loving each other” – a far cry
from the “gloomy, end-of-an-era, swan-song-of-a-group” showcased
and mythologised in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It
Be, Gleiberman added.

Get Back reveals how much the band “genuinely
cared for each other”, agreed music critic Neil McCormick in
The Telegraph^[2]. The series is
essentially “one for all the Beatles’ children, all of us fans who
never really got over our favourite band splitting up”.

The bad

The new release is certainly full of “indelible scenes”, so
“why not five stars?” asked The Times^[3]’ chief film critic Kevin
Maher in a four-star review. At 468 minutes, it is
“perhaps obviously” too long. Over the three parts, the central
debate raging in the band – “Paul wants to stage a live show, the
others aren’t bothered” – is “replayed endlessly”. 

Though given that the original edit was 18 hours, perhaps we
should just be grateful for “small mercies”, Maher added.

Jackson is “not a director noted for the brevity of his
approach”, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian^[4], who pointed out that
the New Zealander’s version of King Kong ran at twice the
length of the original. And “so it proves here”.

Although there are “doubtless” Beatlemaniacs who think the
eight-hour running time is “impossibly stingy”, Petridis continued,
“its sheer length can feel like a schlep” for anyone
else. 

Get Back certainly “takes a long and winding road”,
agreed Empire^[5]’s Ian Freer. But it does
leave “tons of jewels along the way”, he added.

“You can feel Jackson’s love and care in every perfectly
restored frame.”

The second and third instalments of The Beatles: Get
Back, are being released tomorrow and on Saturday respectively
on streaming platform Disney+.