Eight Is Enough?

Last year, Peter Jackson's documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, made a fairly big splash in the zeitgeist. But several years earlier, another well-known director tried his hand at a Beatles documentary.

Ron Howard's 2016 documentary is rather ponderously titled. But you can be pretty sure what you're going to get when you sit down to watch The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years; the film is focused on the period before the band settled into only recording in the studio. Essentially, this is about the phenomenon of Beatlemania.

More than subject matter, this film is very different for its authorial approach. Get Back strives to make the director and editor as "invisible" to the process as possible. Eight Days a Week is more of a narrative experience, guiding you through year by year, labeling most of the footage, and adding unnecessary visual effects to occasionally accent the proceedings. There are lots of "talking head" interviews, many with celebrity fans, but also with each of the Fab Four. (John and George appear in archival footage, of course; Paul and Ringo appear to have recorded new interviews for the film.)

One thing watching this film will do for you, completely separate from any feelings about the Beatles, is make you appreciate just how stunning the restoration techniques of Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop truly are. A lot of the footage in Eight Days a Week doesn't look "bad" (though some of it does), but Get Back magically looks like it could have been filmed yesterday. In just five years, this niche of technology has improved impressively, and it makes Jackson's film feel much more immediate  for it. (There is some footage of the Abbey Road "rooftop concert" at the end of Eight Days a Week, and there you can really see the difference.)

Still, Eight Days a Week makes a notable "companion piece" to Get Back, and I was actually glad I watched them in the order I did. In Eight Days a Week, you really see a group of kids in their early 20s getting caught up in a fame juggernaut. You see them enjoying every minute of it, then pretending to enjoy every minute of it, until finally something has to give. That throughline then informs Get Back, where you can see some of the band yearning to... well... get back some of the fun of those early days. Eight Days a Week makes you feel like these four young men went to war together in their own unique way, and that the experience forever changed them. You kind of understand why, after a while, you just wouldn't want to keep hanging out with your "war buddies," being reminded of all that.

Eight Days a Week is arguably the more accessible documentary for people who don't really think they're into the Beatles. But it also doesn't dig nearly as deep. I give it a B. It probably goes without saying that if you are a Beatles fan, you should check it out. Maybe even again, if you've already watched it, now that you've seen Get Back.