Michael: The History They Chose to Write
- Ben Sorensen
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Winston Churchill allegedly said that “history is kind to he who writes it.” Michael is a $155 million proof of concept.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua and produced, pointedly, by the executors of the Michael Jackson estate, John Branca and John McClain, this is a biopic that arrives with a seating plan already arranged and a guest list that has been very deliberately curated. The question the film can't quite escape, no matter how spectacular the staging or how extraordinary the central performance, is: are we watching someone's life story, or someone's preferred version of it?
Fuqua (Training Day and The Equalizer) is a skilled craftsman. He knows how to build tension, how to move a camera, how to fill a frame with purpose. The production values here are genuinely impressive, the costume work meticulous, the concert recreations extraordinary.
On a purely aesthetic level, Michael earns its ticket price. Antoine Fuqua recreated the Thriller video under a full moon at its original location. You feel it.
And then there's Jaafar Jackson. Michael's nephew, in his first ever film role, does something that should not be biologically possible. He doesn't just resemble his uncle or approximate the moves, he inhabits the frequency. The voice, the delicacy, the coiled electricity in the stillness before a performance. It's an uncanny, off-the-charts piece of work, and it is genuinely the film's greatest achievement. The concert sequences, Motown 25, the Thriller video, Wembley, are thrilling in the way that only live spectacle can be. Whatever the film's problems, and they are real, none of them belong to Jaafar.
Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson is a fascinatingly frustrating performance. As an actor, Domingo is one of the greats, and he doesn't so much play Joe as weaponise him. Under heavy prosthetics, he is menacing, driven, and deeply unsympathetic, a man who understood talent as a resource to be extracted, not a gift to be nurtured. The film correctly identifies Joe as the central villain of Michael's story. The problem is it then applies a kind of moral dimmer switch to him. The real Joe Jackson, a man whose cruelty toward his children has been documented extensively, including by the children themselves, feels in this film like a character who has been dialled down for narrative convenience. The film seems to know it, and look away.
Michael feels less like a biography and more like an authorised monument that is beautifully constructed, carefully positioned, and sealed at the base to prevent anything inconvenient from getting in.
What Michael does best is also what makes it feel so incomplete. The film leans hard into Michael's relationship with animals, his genuine tenderness with the llama, the giraffe, Bubbles the chimp and in those moments, something true and unscripted seems to break through. A man who found connection easiest with creatures who asked nothing of him, who imposed no expectation or performance, and who simply were. That is a profound human detail, and the film is at its most honest in the quiet corners where it surfaces.
The comparison that keeps pressing itself is Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, the films that this one aspires to join. Both of those were deeply personal, emotionally messy, and structurally imperfect. And yet they felt whole. They left you feeling you'd spent time with a person. Michael, despite a longer runtime and a bigger budget, feels like it ends in the middle of a sentence. It wraps up around 1988, the Bad era, and then the screen reads: His story continues. Because of course it does. The franchise is already scheduled.
The inconvenient reality is that Michael Jackson's story after 1988 is precisely where the biography becomes genuinely complex, and genuinely necessary to understand. The Pepsi commercial accident, the scalp injuries, the painkiller addiction that followed, the film gestures at the burns and then pivots to inspiration. The abuse allegations that would shadow the rest of his life, the Leaving Neverland documentary that the estate has since had pulled from streaming, the legal settlements; they are simply not here. Paris Jackson, Michael's own daughter, called the script sugar-coated. She's not wrong. The Leaving Neverland director called it startlingly disingenuous. At 27% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, the critical consensus has been similarly unimpressed, even as audiences seem primed to embrace it warmly.
None of this diminishes the music. It never could. Michael Jackson's catalogue is one of the genuinely great artistic achievements of the twentieth century, and the film conveys, correctly, that being that talented is its own particular kind of trauma. To be extraordinary from the age of ten is to never quite know who you are outside of the thing that made you visible. The film understands this. It just isn't brave enough to follow it all the way through.
Michael is a brilliant concert film attached to a selective memoir. The performances deserve every seat in the house. The story, as told here, deserves a harder conversation than it's willing to have.
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