[Warning: This review contains spoilers.]
I want to say out of the gate that I liked “Bob Marley: One Love” much more than the reviews say. This movie has a 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I don’t think it deserves that. However, I will 100% admit that I went into this movie knowing very little about Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) as a whole. In this review, I solely will be basing my critiques on what I was shown through the movie.
I was a little confused when the movie started because it showed him as a child in the beginning traveling in a bus, then it intercuts that with on-screen text, then shows Bob as an adult doing what seemed to be a press tour. I knew that this movie was going to be a biopic, but it was jarring for me to go from seeing him as a kid, then immediately dealing with him right before he became super famous. However, the movie would go back and forth to the past as a breather for what is happening in the present. These scenes also help build out the main characters, Bob and Rita, in an interesting way. There are wrong ways to go about this, and that tends to do with a few factors:
- Relevance to the movie: Is this flashback relevant? Is anything happening in the past correlating to what is happening now?
- Pacing: Is this dragging the overall movie? Was there a better way to show this information?
- Placement: Did this relieve tension? Does this not feel like a flashback?
After doing some digging, I think I’m able to determine what this dream-like sequence was supposed to mean. In this dream, Bob, as a child, is running away from a burning forest and makes it to a barren field. As this dream continues to be shown again and again throughout the movie, you start to see that he is also being followed by a man on a horse. Finally, at the end of the movie, we see the man stop Bob from running, and Bob joins him to help guide him from the flames. From what I could find, it seems as though the man on the horse could have been Haile Selassie, the former Emperor of Ethiopia. This moment in the movie could be representative of how Bob felt being accepted into his community despite being the descendant of a white man that abandoned his family. I have rewatched the movie since finding this out, and the moment is so much more powerful with that perspective to me.
Now let’s talk about the visuals, because this movie was scratching all my itches, especially in terms of coloring. One of my favorite scenes of the movie was the first major concert scene about 20 minutes in. There was so much shifting of reds and blues to visibly show how a character may be feeling at that time. After Bob Marley performs the iconic mix of War and No More Trouble, there are many hallucination/false reality shots that take place.
In the movie’s timeline, Bob Marley, Rita Marley (Lashana Lynch), and The Wailers had all recently been attacked by a gunman, and that same gunman appeared in the crowd in Bob’s eyes trying to shoot him again. This wasn’t true though, and in these shots they are covered in blue lighting. However, for most of the concert shots, the band is in red lighting. This shows there is a disconnect in reality for Bob at this moment, and it definitively shows this through a birds-eye view of the band slowly being more colored red, and Bob being the only one with a blue light on him.
Everyone in the band eventually gets brought into this reality as all the music cuts out and Bob continues to sing. For a brief moment it seems like everyone is sucked into the reality that Bob finds in his music. It is then when Bob hallucinates the gunman when everyone in the band goes red again to show Bob’s disconnect.
In conclusion, I really liked this movie. All the performances, the shots, the coloring, and the story shown were very interesting to me. As someone who did not know much about Bob Marley prior to watching, I found it to be very easy to understand and to get engrossed in what was happening. Don’t let reviews dictate your opinions, and support local businesses and theaters!
Final Rating – 9/10
