Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back is an eight-hour long, three-part documentary that exhaustively and exhaustingly covers the attempt...
Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back is an eight-hour long, three-part documentary that exhaustively and exhaustingly covers the attempt in January 1969 by the world’s most famous band, The Beatles, to make an album of new tunes performed live, free of overdubbing and supplemental instrumentation. For super-fans like me, it is compelling viewing, but for those who enjoy the group’s music but aren’t interested in listening to dozens of versions of individual songs, it is best consumed in moderation. To such viewers, I recommend watching the fifteen-minute introduction, dipping into each episode two or three times for ten-minute stretches, and then viewing the entirety of the famous performance on the rooftop of their London studio, making for a manageable cumulative running time of around 150 minutes.
The film’s achievement is threefold. First, it exposes the cracks in the group thoroughly enough to make their break-up seem inevitable, but does so without pointing fingers or assigning blame. It is another matter that haters, particularly of the anti-Yoko Ono camp, will find enough evidence to feed their prejudice. Second, even as it underlines divisions between the Fab Four, it shows us how brilliant they were as...
