The Importance of Likable Characters: Bohemian Rhapsody vs. Rocketman

This article was originally published to the movie reviewing app Stardust. Now that the app is officially shutting down, I figured it was time to move the articles I wrote for them onto this page. Here is the first of four of my articles for Stardust.

Seeing Rocketman this past weekend [in June 2019] at my local theater was a huge relief for me. At first, the movie didn’t suck me in; its generic family dynamic, weirdly placed musical numbers and glossy cinematography just felt off to me. However, by the halfway mark, all of the major flaws I had with the film seemed to fix themselves.

The musical numbers found how to weave themselves into the story, the movie focused more on Elton John’s relationship with his mother (which was far more interesting than his relationship with his dad), and the cinematography didn’t bother me after a while. For me, the biggest contributing factor for this was Taron Egerton’s Elton, not just because of his incredible performance, but also because of his likability. This movie proves that likable characters are one of the most important factors to make a movie great.

People raved about this movie saying this is what Bohemian Rhapsody should have been. With no disrespect to those who liked that movie (heck, my parents loved it), I agree with that statement. The biggest problem for me about that movie wasn’t the editing, it wasn’t the performances (Rami Malek was incredible), it wasn’t the cinematography, it was Freddy Mercury and the way he was written.

As musically talented as they show him to be in this movie, they seem to write him as a rude, inconsiderate character from the start of the film. It’s only by the third act of the film when he finally realizes how inconsiderate he’s been that I cared about his arc at all, and by then it was too late to salvage the whole film.

The main problem was that the writers didn’t set up Freddy’s character arc right. The writers should have made him likable from the beginning of the film, then shown how his sudden rise to stardom got to his head and made him more arrogant. By then, the movie has earned the audience’s sympathy for the character and doesn’t want him to go down the path he finds himself on. It’s kind of a big problem when the person your movie is literally paying tribute to isn’t likable for the first two-thirds of the movie.

Elton’s character arc in Rocketman is exactly what it should have been. Elton is a kind, compassionate kid from the start despite his terrible childhood. He’s smart-witted, but not mean, and when we meet him for the first time in the film in the rehab center, he acknowledges there are aspects of his character that he has to change. By the time he starts drinking and taking drugs and letting his sudden fame get to his head, Elton has earned the audience’s sympathy and they want to see him get through this dark path because they know that this is not what Elton is normally like.

The writing in Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t give the audience the chance to realize that Freddy is not normally arrogant. Rocketman’s does. This, to me, is proof that making your characters likable is one of, if not the, most important part of your film.

Which movie did you like better, Rhapsody or Rocketman? Which character arc did you like better, Freddy’s or Elton’s? Let me know down in the comments below!