The Beatles: Get Back

Feels positively chock-full of fresh insights into the inner workings of one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of all time. ... It’s a little too long; it’s just as rewarding watched closely as it is when treated like an audiovisual tapestry you simply play in the background while doing something else. It isn’t perfect; it might be an instant classic?

Simply put, "Get Back" is nothing short of a Thanksgiving holiday miracle. As the series unfolds from dreary Twickenham to the eminently more convivial Savile Row, we observe the Beatles crafting new songs before our very eyes. It makes for a transfixing experience, indeed.

The Beatles: Get Back is as much archaeology as it is cinema, a docuseries committed not just to showing us new moments of the band that we’ve never seen before, but to crafting a broader picture of their oft-controversial dynamic.

One of the most entertaining, compelling and important chapters in filmed music history.

Seeing all of this footage is a revelation, not just for how it provides a necessary counter to the prevailing narrative, but also because the visuals look like a total dream, pristine, sharp and clear, with no fuzz or distortion.

The result is bliss for Beatles fans. Take all the films and interviews with the Beatles and put them off to the side. This is the most informative and illuminating record of what these men were like and of the nature of their interaction.

Overall, Jackson’s insights are savvy, knowing which seemingly repetitive playings of songs or quibbles about performance venues will bring something new to our understanding of these men. ... With a project like this that brings back music history from the cutting room floor to the limelight, it makes sense to have too much rather than too little.

It is a monument to The Beatles, enormous and revealing, which acts as a bulwark against the endless books and articles and chatter about them by simply showing them as they were. In part, it is a corrective, but it is also a fortification. Any future assessment of the band and its members will have to measure up against the people we see here.

What’s startling about “Get Back” is that as you watch it, drinking in the moment-to-moment reality of what it was like for the Beatles as they toiled away on their second-to-last studio album, the film’s accumulation of quirks and delights and boredom and exhilaration becomes more than fascinating; it becomes addictive. ... In the end, “Get Back” is better than good. It’s essential, an extended love letter to everything that made the Beatles real.

Is it a long sit? Definitely. Are there moments when you wish the band would quit noodling around and amusing themselves by playing snippets of rock oldies or the Harry Lime theme from “The Third Man?” Absolutely. Will you feel impatient as you wait for more finished versions of such songs as “Get Back” to emerge? Sure. All that said, Jackson’s film is something special.

There's plenty of story, it just needs to be edited down. Thankfully, much like The Beatles Let It Be album, Jackson's docuseries eventually takes shape, concluding with a thrilling eight song rooftop performance that has now become iconic.

Get Back is a Thanksgiving feast for fans — nearly eight hours of hanging with the Beatles. It’s funnier, louder, sadder, realer than anyone even hoped. But it’s not really about the making of an album or a concert. It’s a stunningly intimate portrait of a friendship — the world’s favorite foursome, then as now.

Joyous, tedious, euphoric and fab, “The Beatles: Get Back” feels like a documentary made yesterday rather than 52 years ago. ... It’s the most Beatle-maniacal epic imaginable, partly because it renders so naked the band’s creative process, and presents their personalities so deeply. ... With "Get Back," Mr. Jackson doesn't make love to the Beatles, exactly, but he gives you all you need.

A hypnotic treat for music scholars and Beatles megafans. But even with the absorbing undercurrent of suspense around the band's fate, Get Back is still eight hours of watching some guys sitting around in a room.

There’s more, so much more, but Get Back’s real revelation is how much real joy there was within and between The Beatles, even as their end loomed.

Most big fans of the band will find this a fascinating insight into the relationships between the four, with nerdy musical insights into the foundations of many of the songs that ended up on the album, and some that didn’t and became classics for the members as solo artists from 1970 onwards. However, for a casual viewer, at times this ‘air’ in the room might be too much to keep them gripped – so be prepared.

Jackson’s obsessional curatorial approach means that this epic documentary takes a very long time to achieve lift off.

The Beatles: Get Back is clearly a labor of love for director Peter Jackson, but it plays as one of the clearest forms of fan worship there ever was, letting the band members act and speak for themselves in a natural format true to even the smallest moments of this crucial period in their history.

It takes a long and winding road, but The Beatles: Get Back leaves tons of jewels along the way, a celebration of not only one band but also music, creativity and friendship. You can feel Jackson’s love and care in every perfectly restored frame.

Peter Jackson has made an immersive, in-the-moment chronicle of a generation-defining band in the act of creating, offering an up-close look at the quartet’s alchemy.

It’s a terrific documentary portrait, but strangely, it might have benefitted from there being somewhat less of it.

"Get Back" isn't for everyone, nor is it meant to be. But to Beatles obsessives, and they're a group that numbers in the millions and spans generations, "Get Back" is a holy grail, and it delivers.

A Beatles buff won’t need any salesmanship to know Disney+ is the place to be this weekend. And even a more casual fan might want to drop in on “Get Back,” just to get a peek at what all the fuss was about and why they still seem relevant over fifty years later. Because “where they once belonged” is where they’ve always been.

For everyone but the most extreme Beatles fanatics, Jackson's Get Back lacks urgency and storytelling, and is too besotted with merely watching the group, in all their mundanity. For the group's most dedicated scholars, though, Jackson's Get Back is a fitting, expansive interrogation and celebration of their waning days.

It’s exhaustive and it’s exhausting, and for a certain type of Beatles fan (like, I suspect, Jackson himself) it’ll be an irresistible delight. ... To embrace these near eight hours, you need to completely surrender to his pacing, to glory in every day of the Beatles’ sessions at Twickenham Studios and then at the smaller recording studio in the basement of their Apple headquarters. You may find yourself wishing that the boys would please shut up and play their instruments on a number of occasions, but the film clings to those endless conversations with the tenacity of McCartney trying to coax the right guitar line out of Harrison.

The moments of inspiration and interest are marooned amid acres of desultory chit-chat (“aimless rambling”, as Lennon rightly puts it) and repetition. There is a point, about five hours in, when the prospect of hearing another ramshackle version of Don’t Let Me Down becomes an active threat to the viewer’s sanity. That is doubtless what recording an album is like, but for an onlooker it is – to use the language of 1969 – a real drag.