Review of Respect (2021) by Ibuddy66 — 15 Aug 2021

After quite a wait, RESPECT came out and was an enjoyable film for the most part. Jennifer Hudson hit a home run at every turn in this film and truly took my breath away multiple times, sending shivers down my spine with how wonderful her voice was (I mean what else could we expect from one of the best voices of our time)!

The film touched on some very impactful moments of Aretha's life, which is to be expected in a biopic. However, it did seem to fail in the area of her relationship with her children. It portrayed Aretha as perhaps one of the worst parental figures of our time basically having the children just on the outskirts of the film the entire time. You never really see her spend time with them except for a few scenes and in the rest they're background characters and rarely alluded to or mentioned. It was a big misstep as far as direction goes. Children shouldn't be counted out as major plot points of a biopic ever. The remainder of the cast did a pretty great job with the film as well. I was glad that they took some sensitive early moments and portrayed them the way they did instead of using a graphic depiction. It was, to me, more impactful this way. Overall, I'd say the film did a great job, but definitely had some misses and opportunities to be better. Some portions of her life they seemed to dwell on at times and it would last much too long, when other moments that may have seemed very important were dealt with much quicker and could have been longer instead of others in the film. I look forward to having this film at home, but it is certainly one that needs to be seen in the theater sheerly for the sound design. The music all felt live and really utilized the surround sound technology to encompass the audience completely in a wonderful experience.