Yesterday Movie Review

Yesterday (2019)

Rent Yesterday on Amazon Video
Written by: Jack Barth (story by), Richard Curtis (screenplay), Richard Curtis (story by)
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: Himesh Patel, Lily James, Sophia Di Martino, Ed Sheeran, Kate McKinnon
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer

Plot
A struggling musician realizes he's the only person on Earth who can remember The Beatles after waking up in an alternate timeline where they never existed.

Verdict
It's a romance story with fame, fortune, and fraud woven in. The alternate timeline complicates the romance, but it's also what makes it interesting. Past the very creative premise, there isn't much to the movie. The ingenuity is just a veil for a love story.
I really wanted the movie to delve deeper. How would the world be different if The Beatles never existed?
The deletions in this alternate world are purely surface level, the first used for the plot with the rest used as punch lines. There are no rippling ramifications and that makes this premise very shallow. There would have to  be some kind of butterfly effect, and it's just too easy to ignore that and not even try to come up with what kind of world would or could exist.
It depends.

Review
I love the concept, but I'm disappointed it's an isolated deletion that has no impact on any other facet of the world. No Beatles would presumably have a ripple throughout the world.
This is written by Richard Curtis, and it's easy to see elements from his other works such as Notting Hill and Love, Actually. He certainly has a style.

Himesh Patel and Lily James play Jack and Ellie.

Jack is the only person that remembers The Beatles. No one else has heard of the group, so he desperately attempts to recreate their songs to preserve the memory. Being a struggling musician and the fact no one believes him, he passes the songs off as his own and rises to stardom. It starts off mostly innocent, but he has another shot at being a musician even if these songs aren't his. Jack achieves his dream on the back of a lie. The drama I thought would result from that, doesn't. While Jack is uncomfortable with the lie, he's not too uncomfortable. The movie is primarily a romance between Jack and Ellie.

I wondered if I needed to know Beatles songs to get this movie, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Jack doesn't seem to change the songs other than one very obvious change.
I wondered if Jack would just fill in the blanks and make up what he can't remember, but that doesn't seem to happen.
No one seems to appreciate the songs at first. I wasn't sure if that was the venue or if the message is that the songs are devoid of meaning without context, but this movie just isn't that deep. Soon, Jack becomes a star. He just need the right person to hear the songs.

There's a manager that wants to make a commodity out of Jack. It's played for laughs, but probably close to the truth. We get a few glimpses of behind the scenes of the industry and that's a lot of fun. The marketing is really pushing how Jack did all this himself. It doesn't push him to a breaking point though.

Plenty of other things don't exist in this timeline like cigarettes, Coke, and Harry Potter but they don't serve a point other than a quick punch line. Because of that, I wish The Beatles were the only difference in this alternate world. There is no subtlety to any of it. The other deletions are easy jokes. I wanted them to serve a purpose, I wanted more from this movie. While it's difficult to imagine how the premise would affect the world at large, it's the superior movie that creates that world.

Jack can't reproduce Beatles songs forever. I wondered if he would get fifteen minutes of fame with one great album and then return to his previous life, but again, the movie doesn't go there either. The movie isn't much different from Notting Hill, with a slightly adjacent perspective that isn't near as quotable.