It’s finally here.
A teaser trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody is finally here.
The trailer rocks as hard as any Queen-centric project can and promises a release date of November 2nd, 2018. Take a moment to watch it and try sitting still through the whole thing.
We Are Already Rocking You
Rami Malek is electric as Freddie Mercury, the ill-fated lead singer of Queen, easily the most innovative and daring band in the post-Beatles landscape. Whether you’re familiar with deep tracks, or only ever stomp to “Another One Bites the Dust”, it’s hard to deny Queen’s magnetic pull, even after all these years. So hard to deny, in fact, that the British west end theatre that houses “We Will Rock You” (a Queen-based jukebox musical from the brain of Brian May) had a larger-than-life faux gold statue of Freddie outside the ticket booth for its first ten years’ worth of shows. “We Will Rock You” opened in 2002, and on its tenth anniversary the statue disappeared.
Bohemian Rhapsody: The Trailer
Have you rewatched it yet? Maybe do that now, then come back. We good? Great.
Freddie was singular, but that doesn’t make him faultless. An easy thing to do here would be to clean up his legacy, ignore the flaws and the affairs and the short temper. But even in this 1:37 teaser, it’s clear that Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t flinch. Malek manages to show off Freddie’s vulnerability, genius, anger, and, most importantly, his charisma. Sometimes all it takes is a tilt of his shoulder. Other times it’s the way he could get an entire stadium of people to sing along with wordless riffs.
Perfect casting doesn’t stop with Malek, though. See below for side-by-side comparisons of the original band members and their modern-day counterparts.
The trailer also blends songs from the Queen catalogue as though that’s the only way they should be heard: bleeding seamlessly back and forth between tracks. The result is a heady, non-stop ride that leaves you dizzy in the best of ways by the end.
Don’t even get me started on the costumes.
After a rocky start, a change in directors, and a complete halting of production, Bohemian Rhapsody’s future could have been cut short. Thank goodness it rallied and returned, ready for theatres this fall. Without any blockbusters as competition, here’s to hoping it does as well in theatres as it clearly deserves.
