WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Yesterday, in theaters now.
Yesterday introduces audiences to a unique alternate reality in which there aren't any Beatles. No John, no Paul, no George, no Ringo, which means no, "Yesterday," no, "Yellow Submarine," and no, "Twist and Shout." It's truly terrifying, but surely everything gets reset to normal at the end, right? Surely Danny Boyle wouldn't willfully leave us in a world with no Beatles...? As it turns out, yes, he would.
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Yesterday follows Himesh Patel's character, Jack, as he navigates a newly Beatle-less world as the only person he knows of that remembers their music. At first he seizes the opportunity to invigorate his non-existent music career with some of the best pop music ever put to page, but as he rapidly reaches heights of fame comparable to, well, Beatlemania, the guilt over stealing the legacy of his idols starts to get him down.
So, does he seek out Dr. Strange to figure out just what the heck is going on in the multiverse? Nope. Instead, he gets an audience with an aged John Lennon and subsequently gives all the music he passed off as his own to the world for free.
The film ends with Jack taking the opportunity to honor his idols' legacy by simply ensuring that whatever mini-Snap ripped the Beatles from this world wouldn't also eliminate their music. He returns to being a teacher and John Lennon continues a quiet life by the sea, unaware of any other kind of life.
This is fitting for a film like Yesterday, which engages with a supernatural premise but basically uses its alternate universe as a plot device and/or comic relief. Jack realizes several other key elements of his world are missing as time passes (Coca-Cola, cigarettes, the band Oasis), but none of them cause any discernible butterfly effect changes as one would expect from the elimination of several major pieces of pop culture. This isn't sci-fi, this is some sort of rom-com hybrid using science fiction as its jumping off point, but that's all. And that's for the better, honestly.
Ultimately, Yesterday is a film that wants to have a conversation around how we experience and share art that moves us. Eliminating the Beatles was a quick and intriguing way to have that conversation. It's Jack's decision to share his unexpected treasure with the world selflessly that gets down to one of the movie's central themes. The music is bigger than him, and it's more important that people hear it than that he mines fortune and glory from it, and fortune and glory don't treat Jack so well in the movie, anyway. And that's a rhetoric Lennon probably would've been pleased with. In sharing their music, Jack introduces a whole new generation to the Beatles' work, as well as their humanistic philosophy.
Yesterday could almost even serve as a metaphor for different generations of Beatles' fans encountering their work (or any artistic work, really) and how their perceptions of it are so colored by context. Younger generations are so inundated by constant content and fast turnover, which reduces the number of acts that can maintain the kind of steady rise and production level of a group like the Beatles did.
One day there could be a Beatle-less world, and part of the love story in Yesterday is Jack's devotion to their music and exhibiting how it's groundbreaking enough to become immortal even without the people who created it working to get it heard. Jack illustrates what it really means to be a superfan in the most positive sense: To share what you love and why you love it with as many likeminded people as possible.
Directed by Danny Boyle from a story by Richard Curtis and Jack Barth, Yesterday stars Himesh Patel, Lily James, Ed Sheeran and Kate McKinnon. The film is in theaters now.