Tweet

For years, movie studios and companies have tried to make the biggest and most accurate Elvis Presley biography movie ever made and have not succeeded. Movies like Elvis and Nixon, The King, and Bubba Ho-Tep have all flopped and lost millions of dollars upon release.

Right when it seems studios have stopped trying to recreate and accurately depict Elvis’s life, Warner Brothers Studios released Elvis on June 24^th, 2022. Critics doubted and questioned if Austin Butler, who played Elvis, could really play all stages of Elvis’s life.

But he exceeded expectations and more. Elvis made a total of $210 million in roughly two months. It wasn’t easy, the movie has been in the works for over 14 years and took Austin Butler over two years of studying Elvis’s every movement.

The acting is the best part of this movie. Butler’s time and effort that he put into studying Elvis and being around the real-life Priscilla Presley, who was Elvis’s wife for six years, paid off. There have been comparisons and side-by-side shots comparing Butler’s acting to Elvis’s performing and the similarities are shocking. It appears every single move that Elvis did on stage, Austin completely recreated. Everything from his looks, the way he dressed, to the way he sounded nailed the character of Elvis Presley.

Although Austin’s acting was the spotlight, I thought the best played role was Tom Hanks playing the role of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager. Not only did Hanks look very similar to Tom Parker, but Hanks played one of the most dislikeable characters I have ever seen in a movie. I feel like the ability to have played so many loveable characters like Forrest Gump, Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan, and Chuck Noland from Cast Away, to playing a character that is so evil like Tom Parker really shows how versatile he is and cements him as one of the greatest actors of all time.

Another underrated part of this movie was the wardrobe. The designer of the outfits, Catherine Martin, said this about making Butlers outfits, “I think one of the things the Graceland archive allowed me to see was a world that formed Elvis. I saw the kind of financial simplicity that he came from, and how extraordinary his fashion choices are because he’s completely self-created.” The fact that she was able to recreate such unique and elaborate outfits accurately added so much to the movie. Although there were some careless details in the movie, they definitely didn’t slack with the costumes.

My biggest problem with the movie was CGI that was used. There were so many fake landscapes where if they just took the time and effort to make them real it would’ve made the movie so much better. I understand some of the usages of it like putting in fake crowds and fake smoke due to it being filmed during COVID but some of the effect just seemed careless and lazy.

I believe that Elvis is so far the best movie to come out of 2022. Everything from the music, to the acting, to the outfits are perfect. I just wished the producer, Baz Luhrmann, showed more effort to have more realistic backdrops and just all around less effects. I would rate this movie 8.3/10. I would recommend everyone to watch this, even if you aren’t a big fan of Elvis.