‘Michael’ Is The Most Cynical Attempt At Biopic Myth-Making Yet

It is a movie not at all designed to tell a history, least of all the history of Michael Jackson. Directed, in the scariest of scare quotes, by Antoine Fuqua, Michael tells a very abridged version of Jackson's ascendence, from child superstar (played by Juliano Valdi) to king of pop (played by Jackson's nephew Jaafar Jackson). Much of the Motown and Jackson 5 era is told in montage, only stopping intermittently to highlight how sensitive of a person Michael is and how disconnected he is from other people due to his demanding father and being in a big pop group with his brothers. Later, as Jackson moves into adulthood, the movie aims to recreate the magic behind the making of the albums Off The Wall and Thriller, while stopping intermittently to highlight how sensitive of a person Michael is and how disconnected he is from other people: watching cartoons with his mom, wanting to play Twister with his big brothers, adopting a monkey named Bubbles, who shows up in this movie like he was one of the Avengers. There are many moral problems with this movie, which we will get into, but just from a filmmaking perspective, so much of this is unbelievably cynical. It's one thing to watch a superhero movie and know that it's primary job is to sell toys and merchandise; it's quite another to watch a biopic with more or less the same objective. The movie treats Jackson as if he were some sort of Marvel character, with subtle references to his many cosmetic surgeries, his addiction to pain killers, and his fixation with Peter Pan sprinkled in like Easter eggs for his biggest fans to go seek out. Even if a movie produced in collaboration with Jackson's infamously protective estate was never going to seriously confront Jackson's child sexual abuse cases, there is presumably a lot that could be said about even a sanitized version of one of the greatest, most fascinating artists of all time. And yet, Jackson is barely a person in his own movie. He is at best an idea, one vaguely though carefully sketched to undermine the bad things you know about him.