Today, even on his 68th posthumous birthday, Michael Jackson is one of those pop culture figures who need no introduction. But the ‘Michael’ biopic presented a chance to introduce him to a new generation who may have only been vaguely familiar with him.
Known for his heart-ablazing mystique and coolness that practically possessed the common zeitgeist for decades, he set the stage for popular contemporary music as we know it through revolutionizing the use of music videos, choreography, commercial endorsements, and popular artists in the few years following his peak, and today they have all essentially been using Jackson’s template for over half a century.
For a movie centering around a pop star that was so supremely cool and broke creative boundaries, it doesn’t seem to take a lot of risk to make it stand out from other dime-a-dozen biopics.
The movie recounts the life of Michael Jackson from his early years in Gary, Indiana as the lead singer of the Jackson 5 with his brothers under the control of his abusive father, to the peak of his career and dissolvement from the band as he released his three most iconic albums (“Off the Wall,” “Thriller,” and “Bad”), with the dramatic conflict of the film mostly centering around the tension between him and his father and the degree of isolation he feels from others because of his quirky nature.
The film has merit, carried by its lead actors. Jaafar Jackson, the nephew of the titular character, gives a particularly raw performance to the point that it felt like you were watching Michael Jackson himself on the screen rather than a simple portrayal.
Atlanta resident Anzika Tuliva, who grew up during Jackson mania, noted that Jackson did “a good job of learning the mannerisms and sounding/dancing like him.” In a positive review, Variety lauds the movie’s montages of milestone events in Jackson’s career, specifically highlighting the strong scene where Jackson and his team pressure Walter Yetnikoff (the former CBS Records President) to air Jackson’s videos on MTV.
It was hard not to feel exhilarated when he recreated his uncle’s most iconic moments on stage, thanks to the zeal he brought to miming them.
Westlake High School junior Nia Coleman recounting crying during the reenactment of Jackson’s legendary hit “Human Nature.” Colman Domingo and Nia Long (who portray Joe and Katherine Jackson) also deliver very heartfelt performances that help give weight to the movie’s dramatic and emotional core, respectively.
However, what the movie makes up for in performance value, it fails to truly deliver in any other category.
The movie gives you little time to linger on Jackson’s childhood and breezes through key events of Michael’s career, with the pacing of a rushed PowerPoint presentation about a historical figure.
Atlanta teenager Alaina Welmaker said she wished the film felt more like an “exploration into his personal life” rather than a recreation of “Michael’s biggest hits and the landmarks of his career.” The movie also suffers from a chronic lack of character or anything that sets it apart from other biopics. Its plot beats and overall structure are so cliché that you could swap in different characters and edit the details to make this movie about anyone else.
This isn’t necessarily unique to his movie, let alone other biopics about music stars. Still, it’s a major missed opportunity to display how interesting Jackson’s life was as both an artist and a public figure.
This lack of character doesn’t stop with the writing; the film’s cinematography and coloring feel like a mid-budget Netflix show. The movie has no unique visual identity to set it apart, which is a real shame. Given that Jackson’s public persona was that of uniqueness incarnate, the fact that self-aware, comedic music videos like Thriller, with detailed costume design and homages to horror movies of the olden days, heavily outweigh the care of a movie centered on Jackson’s life speaks volumes. This, combined with the serious anachronism in casting and costume design, doesn’t make the movie feel set in the 70s-80s, but rather a hollow imitation of those eras with little to offer stylistically.
In the end, the ‘Michael’ movie isn’t horrifically bad, and it’ll most certainly leave your parents who grew up in the era of Jacksonmania feeling nostalgic. But for a movie based on the career of someone so interesting, it offers such a sterile characterization of his life that it won’t pose any questions other than whether Jackson would even feel passionate about the movie.
