Then again, the beauty of the Sgt Pepper album was that the plot was never really there. Outside of the opening song and the reprise at the end, each track on the record was about trying to paint a picture of psychedelia rather than capture a specific concept across its runtime. And while the film does adhere to that by featuring other songs from across The Beatles’ career, a good idea and blind faith isn’t all it takes to make a great movie.

There are a few standout moments, like Aerosmith showing up for ‘Come Together’ and Earth Wind and Fire doing a funky-as-hell cover of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, but those are subtle vignettes in a complete trash story. Since most of the film is original content, we follow the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton as the titular Lonely Hearts Club Band as they get up to various shenanigans after getting a record deal and fight villains that are against rock and roll.

While the greedy side of the villain’s plotline is already a half-hearted jab at record labels, any chance of defeating them with these songs is like David trying to conquer Goliath with a feather for a sword. The disco-fied takes on tracks like ‘Oh Darling’ all but neuter the original versions, and even if they were trying to fit in with the times, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ feels like it had all of the angst and bluesy swagger sapped out of it.

And when they actually bother to think outside the box for some interpretations, it’s far from the kind of message people would want to hear. ‘When I’m 64’ may not have been the best song that Paul McCartney ever wrote, but did it have to be part of a sequence where an older man is creeping on the female heartthrob of the film, Strawberry Fields? Also, who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to take The Beatles’ greatest vocal showcase, ‘Because’, and have Alice Cooper recreate it to sound like some hit of bad acid?

Compared to most music biopics that don’t work out, though, Sgt Peppers is the one movie that actually makes the original songs hard to go back to. A song like ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ was already not that great of a song, but hearing the Gibb brothers sing their hearts out and make it sound even more irritating is enough for people to give up on listening to the original.

And what’s even more sad is the amount of Beatles connective tissue that the movie has connected to it. ‘Get Back’ may have benefited from having Billy Preston’s gorgeous keyboard lines on it, but seeing him sing his own version of the tune is nothing but cringey in the film’s climax, and the real tragedy comes when you realise that George Martin had to put this on his resume for being the musical director of the project.

As for The Beatles themselves, some of them have denounced the film if they’ve said anything at all, with George Harrison saying that the Bee Gees damaged their careers by starring in it. Even if there is some fine craftsmanship behind some of the covers, the amount of digging that most people have to do to find them isn’t worth it when slogging through the rest of the stinkers on here.

The Beatles deserve to have their music represented in the best light that they can, but in terms of raw execution, this is the best case that younger generations have for why the Fab Four sound so boring today. Sure, songs in 1965 aren’t going to sound the same to people in 2025, but if this was all we had to commemorate history’s greatest band, there’s a good chance that the band would have been read their last rites ages ago.

Related Topics