Off-Topic: A Star Is Born (2018) Review

It’s challenging for the fourth remake of a legendary musical to hold its own, but A Star Is Born (2018) still manages to hit all the right chords.

Bradley Cooper has directed one of the finest films of 2018 in his debut. This movie is one of the shoo-ins to win the Best Original Song at the 91st Academy Awards for “Shallow” and it deserves to win in other categories as well.

The paramount aspect about this film is the undeniable chemistry between the two leads. Not since Aashiqui 2 (2013) have a pair in a music-based outing looked so compatible on screen. Ironically, Aashiqui 2 is the Bollywood remake of the original A Star Is Born (1937).

This fourth version is a musical which doesn’t just showcase songs for the sake of being a musical, but it features tracks which are actually worth listening to again and again. The direction impeccably balances music with storytelling—something which another musical, The Greatest Showman, failed to achieve in 2017.

However, the film fails to remove any semblance of predictability from its script co-written by Cooper along with Eric Roth and Will Fetters. Moreover, Lady Gaga’s character Ally’s transition to popular music is overshadowed by the romantic angle of the screenplay. Only if the middle portion of the movie was better written then A Star Is Born would’ve been almost perfect.

To end with, A Star Is Born isn’t a superior rags-to-riches musical than Begin Again (2013), or a more deeper take on the rock-to-pop phase of an artist’s career as compared to Rock of Ages (2012). But it manages to encompass multiple genres in a single film and deliver Oscar-worthy performances from Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, and Sam Elliot. A Star Is Born is extremely clichéd but you’re bound to love it despite of its unoriginality.