Bill and Ted Face the Music (Review)
Bill and Ted Face the Music (Review)
9/18/20
DISCLAIMER: In this essay I'll have the first two paragraphs be reviews of the first two Bill and Ted movies so you all can get my thoughts on them and the rest be about the third. Second disclaimer: Our latest movie "The Legend of the Diehards" is releasing this evening. Really excited for everyone to see it, and I'll leave a link in our next post. But in the meantime, you can go check it out on our YouTube page (link in at the end before the images), and you can also watch our other movies.
Before Keanu Reeves was kicking ass in the Matrix movies and the John Wick trilogy, he was yet another adult actor who played a high-schooler. Keanu hit his adult high-school in the late 80s and early 90s. So did Alex Winter, and while these were Keanu's taking off point into Hollywood, they were arguably Winter's glory days. The most notable movie in this point in the two men's careers was a movie called "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure". The movie has been talked down to by critics because of its completely stupid 90s teen nature which is where it finds its loads of charm. The film centers around two high-schoolers, Bill and Ted, who were given a time machine in order to pass a history report needed to keep Bill from being sent to military school. It's a silly and weird adventure that deserves its title as a late 80s classic of sorts.
Two years after the original comes a far weirder sequel called "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey". In this one, a clone of Bill and Ted are sent back from the future to murder Bill and Ted before their music takes off to be the fundamentals for society hundreds of years later. Oddly enough, they succeed, which spawns an adventure through the writers' rendition of Hell and Heaven with the Grim Reaper (known better as "Death"). They meet an alien scientist in Heaven, save the girls, and perform a rock show and that's the end. This movie was fine, but certainly on the stranger side, and not in a very good way. The original movie's first half was pretty boring after they launched off to rally up the historical figures, but it makes up for this with the second half being truly great. In this one, the first half keeps your interest, and the second half desperately tries to with a multitude of strange and costly effects and characters that hardly make sense if you think about it all for even a second. Though, thankfully, the charm carries over into this movie, still making it a good entry in the franchise.
After the rock show in the second movie, many newspaper headlines fly across the screen mimicking stories of history's big rock bands in a comedic fashion, but only to tell a joke. The third movie builds from these headlines, and the many plot holes and confusing elements begin to spiral from there. In the latest entry, "Bill and Ted Face the Music", Bill and Ted are over forty years old and still trying to write the song that would unite the world. The movie doesn't start off terrible; it seems to try to introduce the viewers to the wild idea of a new Bill and Ted movie, which is very nice. We quickly see that they have had daughters with the princesses which, to further prove the friends obsession with each other, they named the daughters after themselves. Ted's daughter named Billie, and Bill's daughter named Thea. This keeps some of the ridiculousness and charm of the movie, but it all goes downhill from here.
This part will now include spoilers for the movie. If you have not seen the movie and intend to see it and not have it all spoiled, please skip this next paragraph to my closing thoughts (which are spoiler-free). Bill and Ted later meet Kristen Schaal in an egg time machine, and she explains some weird plot which ends with them having to come up with the song before that evening. They later go into counseling with their wives, and they think of a pretty straightforward solution. They go into the future and find their older selves and try to steal it from them. Apparently, they hadn't written the song at those future times, and they visit three throughout the movie. The plot continues to get messy and forgettable, and becomes too confusing for me to say here.
Overall, this movie was a messy and confusing Bill and Ted spinoff, if anything. The first two movies set a precedent of something new and strange being introduced in each movie, but this one brought nothing to offer. This aside, the movie could have been far worse. There wasn't any part I really enjoyed, but there wasn't any part I really hated. There were some I disliked, for sure, but none I disliked so badly to feel the need to rant about them for paragraphs. In conclusion, I would not recommend this movie to anyone. Not because it is that bad, but because I do not want anyone on Earth supporting the disrespecting of classic franchises. Giving this movie a 1-10 using half numbers, I give this movie a 4.5/10 with a five-word description of: "Hollywood, stop being so greedy."
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