Bohemian Rhapsody: Brian May SLAMS critics pointing out Freddie Mercury ‘mistakes’ in film

The Freddie Mercury biopic has seen huge success at the box office and in winning big at this year’s Oscars. However, Bohemian Rhapsody received a green splat from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes. And now Queen guitarist May has responded to alleged mistakes concerning Freddie in the movie, saying scraps have been picked up from press stories and unauthorised biographies. The 71-year-old legend has been visiting Zanzibar, Freddie’s birthplace, including the hospital Farouk Bulsara was born in.

In a new Instagram post, May wrote: “Some of the comments on my previous post about the ‘accuracy’ of the Bohemian Rhapsody film make me realise that many people don’t understand what ‘accurate’ means in the context of a biopic – rather than a documentary. 

“Stop and think about it. You’re trying to portray 20 years in two hours of screen time. And you have a story you want to tell about the emotional and spiritual journey of a man in the context of his family and friends, and his entire life’s work. 

“You want to tell the story honestly, decently, without avoiding any important issues, yet without gratuitous prurient detail. You want it to make sense to people of all races, colours, sexual proclivities and ages. And, crucially, you want it to be entertaining, emotionally inspiring, or else why bother ?! 

“Think about the vast amount of situations and millions of words actually spoken in that 20 years. There is no way to do tell your story without compressing time scales, moving events around, condensing multiple conversations over years into single scenes, amalgamating characters, and basically LEAVING 99.9 per cent of what actually happened OUT !!!”

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May added: “A few armchair critics think, by comparing the film’s narrative with scraps that they’ve picked up from press stories, unauthorised biographies, etc, that they see ‘mistakes’? 

“I can assure you all that not a single, word, action, emotion in Bohemian Rhapsody is there by accident, or for any other reason than to provide an insight, a clue to the big picture, a brush stroke in a coherent portrait of a man and his life and dreams. 

“The fact that this movie has become by far the most successful biopic in history tells me that we – or actually the whole BR team – on the whole – got it right.”

May also posted about viewing an “expurgated” version of Bohemian Rhapsody on Oman Air.

The Queen guitarist wrote: “Great movies on this plane! Bohemian Rhapsody, eh ?! I had to take a look at it – to check out how much our movie had been ‘expurgated’ for showing on Oman Air. 

“Yep – they sure hacked away it – no kissing, no ‘b*****ks’, and Freddie wasn’t even allowed to quite get to the point of ‘confessing’ to Mary – though it was pretty clear what the scene was about. 

“By the end, I really did feel that a lot of the film’s message was lost. Which made me sad. 

“But then again, a lot of the good stuff DID come across even in this version.”