Biopics are often accused of simply retelling the story of a famous person. No wonder, this happens often uninspired waywhen only one station is covered after the other, so that you would have been just as well served with a Wikipedia entry.
Not so with Robbie Williams: In order to contrast the described extreme case of a boring biopic with something completely bizarre, director and screenwriter Michael Gracey decided to make the biopic about the singer with a CGI monkey to tell a story that could have come straight out of a Planet of the Apes film.
Don’t you believe that? Then convince yourself!
First trailer for Better Man: Robbie Williams’ life story, told with a CGI monkey
Better Man – Trailer (German subtitles) HD
On paper, Better Man’s story sounds like paint-by-numbers. 16-year-old Robbie Williams obtained by the band Take That great fame and turns into one of the brightest stars in the pop sky. But with success comes personal and professional problems, including drug addiction.
Yes, we’ve seen this story countless times before – but never with a CGI monkey in the lead role spoken by its original star becomes. Robbie Williams lends his voice to the ape Robbie, while the body is brought to life through a motion capture performance by Jonno Davies.
How on earth do you come up with such a strange idea? Salon’s review states that Gracey a conversation with Williams who confessed to the filmmaker that he often felt like one “dancing monkey” sees. The result looks to be an absolute must-see event on the big screen.
Or as film critic Rocco T. Thompson puts it at Salon:
This exuberant, almost unique biopic walks a dizzying tightrope between stupidity and profoundness and is as difficult to resist as the belief that it came into being in the first place. Robbie Williams biopic: When does Better Man start in cinemas?
Better Man starts in Germany on January 2, 2025 in the cinemas. Until then, you should definitely watch Gracey’s first film, The Greatest Showman. The energetic musical is also based on the career of a real person, namely circus pioneer PT Barnum. Now we can’t wait to see what happens when Gracey adds a CGI monkey to the equation.