Is the new Bill & Ted movie truly excellent
or bogus? Turns out, it's a little of both.
Here are the five best and five worst things
in Bill & Ted Face the Music.
Bill & Ted Face the Music opens with a wedding,
as Bill and Ted's ex-stepmom, Missy, is now
marrying Ted's little brother, Deacon. After
delivering a strange yet heartfelt wedding
speech, Bill and Ted honor the happy couple
by providing the music for their first dance:
the world premiere of the first three movements
of "That Which Binds Us Through Time: The
Chemical, Physical, and Biological Nature
of Love: An Exploration of the Meaning of
Meaning, Part 1."
"One two three four"
What follows is a bizarrely hilarious mishmash
of throat singing, bagpipes, trumpet, and
who knows what else. As Missy and Deacon try
in vain to dance to the strange noises Bill
and Ted are producing, it's clear just how
desperate Bill and Ted have become to try
to compose the song that Rufus told them they
were destined to write. Between the song and
their speech, it's a perfect re-introduction
to Bill and Ted, showing that they're still
the same lovable doofuses from the first two
movies while also acknowledging how the intervening
25 years have weighed on them.
While we're glad that Bill and Ted's wives,
princesses Joanna and Elizabeth, get a little
more to do in Face the Music than in the previous
two films, their subplot winds up being one
of the film's weaker links. Early on, their
much-older selves arrive in a time machine
of their own to take their younger counterparts
to find a reality where they're happy with
Bill and Ted. But ultimately, the princesses
realize they're happiest in the present with
their husbands, which begs the question of
why the elderly princesses felt the need to
intervene in their lives in the first place.
Even if the future princesses actually traveled
back in time to save their marriages, that
doesn't make sense when we learn the real
reason why Joanna and Elizabeth have requested
marriage counseling. It's not, as is first
implied, because they are frustrated by their
husbands' co-dependence. It's actually because
they're worried about their emotional wellbeing
after 25 years of trying to write a world-saving
song and coming up empty. So it seems like
their marriages weren't even in trouble to
begin with, and the idea of leaving their
husbands only ever occurred to them when their
future selves showed up. What was the point
of it all? We may never know.
At the end of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey,
we were introduced to babies "Little Bill"
and "Little Ted." In Face the Music, we learn
that those babies are actually Bill and Ted's
daughters, Thea "Theodora" Preston and Billie
S. Logan, and that they've grown up to be
their dads' biggest fans.
After seeing their dads disappear into the
future, Billie and Thea embark on an excellent
adventure of their own, trying to assemble
the greatest band the world has ever seen
to help their dads perform their song.
"I feel so bad for them. They've been doing
this on their own for the longest time."
"Yeah, I wish there was some way we could
help them out, you know?"
But Billie and Thea's greatest contribution
to Bill & Ted Face the Music are actresses
Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving themselves,
who recall the same exuberant energy that
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter brought to the
original film. Yet Billie and Thea aren't
carbon copies of their dads, either, as evidenced
by their more thoughtful approach to problem
solving and surprisingly advanced understanding
of temporal dynamics. They're a delightful
addition to the world of Bill & Ted, and we
wouldn't say no to seeing Billie & Thea's
Excellent Adventure at some point down the
timeline.
From Excellent Adventure to Face the Music,
Bill and Ted have always managed to remain
the same big hearted, well intentioned, music
loving bozos that we first met as teenagers.
Yet in Bill & Ted Face the Music, when Bill
and Ted decide to head to the future to see
if they can get their world-uniting song from
their future selves, nearly every version
of themselves that they meet is a total jerk.
They start out by traveling to 2022, where
they meet themselves as bitter, washed-up
has-beens who have been left by their wives
and are living in a van. Their next stop is
2025, where they find themselves squatting
at Dave Grohl's mansion in an attempt to pass
one of the Foo Fighters frontman's songs off
as their own. The 2025 Bill and Ted even wind
up attempting to kill their past selves, even
though that would lead to their own destruction.
Then they head to 2030, where they're in prison
and are determined to swap places with their
2020 counterparts. Not only does it not make
sense that none of these Bills or Teds would
have any memory of their universe-aligning
concert in 2020, but their characterization
is light years from the previously consistent
twosome we've come to know and love.
While most of the members of Bill and Ted's
band that perform at the end of the film were
carefully curated by their daughters, Kid
Cudi is a gift from the universe itself. At
the beginning of Bill & Ted Face the Music,
we learn that the very fabric of space and
time is unraveling, with people disappearing
from their own times and getting transported
into totally different times and places. That's
how Kid Cudi winds up dropping onto Bill and
Ted's cul-de-sac in San Dimas, right as Thea
and Billie have returned home with their newly
assembled band.
But while Kid Cudi is a fun addition to the
band, he brings a lot more than his rapping
and music production skills to the table.
It turns out that this version of Kid Cudi
is obsessed with quantum physics, and as soon
as Billie and Thea explain to him what's happening
with the universe, he instantly grasps what's
going on. For the rest of the film, Kid Cudi
serves as the group's resident time travel
expert, whom they consult whenever they have
a particularly tricky quantum conundrum. It's
fun to have a member of the group who talks
about time travel in a more academic way than
we're used to from Bill & Ted films, even
if other characters rarely understand him.
The Great Leader has a very different view
of history than her late husband, Rufus, and
rather than attempting to help Bill and Ted,
she constructs an assassin robot to kill them.
Given the name Dennis Caleb McCoy, the robot
skips around the timeline, determined to exterminate
his targets.
Eventually he succeeds, killing himself in
the process, and winds up sending all three
of them to Hell to negotiate with Death. From
then on, Dennis is just a strange tag-along
who acts more like a lost child than a killer
robot. Overall, his inclusion seems intended
to add laughs, but instead it winds up dragging
the film down, with Dennis failing to live
up to the high energy and zany comedy of the
other characters. Even his dancing at the
end feels a little dull and disconnected,
which is unfortunate when everything else
about the final concert comes together so
well.
After spending most of three movies under
the impression that the fate of the world
rests entirely on their own shoulders, Bill
and Ted realize in the climax of Face the
Music that it's their daughters, not them,
who have the potential to save the universe.
It still fits with what Rufus told them in
the first movie, when he explained why he
had to ensure Bill and Ted weren't separated:
"You see, eventually your music will help
put an end to war and poverty. It will align
the planets and bring them into universal
harmony."
It turns out that Bill and Ted needed to stay
together so that Billie and Thea could grow
up side by side, listening to music and hearing
their dads' stories of traveling through time.
Does it make complete sense with what we've
previously been told? Well, no, but that's
par for the course for a Bill & Ted movie.
Besides, the reason it works isn't because
it's an intricately conceived plot twist,
but because it shows the growth of Bill and
Ted's characters. They began the franchise
desiring greatness for themselves, but they
end it by showing that they're willing to
step away from the spotlight without a second
thought, handing it over to their kids, for
the greater good.
When you think about it, the Great Leader's
plan is a little ridiculous. She tells her
daughter, Kelly, that she believes that the
deaths of Bill and Ted will usher in the events
that lead to their utopian future and repair
the universe, not their song performance.
But that doesn't jibe at all with what we
were told in the first film, or even with
the worldbuilding of the third film. The Great
Leader knows the precise date and time of
the concert which will repair the universe
and lead to their society, yet somehow reasons
that preventing the concert by killing Bill
and Ted is the better option. There's no evidence
that seems to support her belief, and by trying
to prevent events that already happened earlier
in her own timeline, she seems to be risking
catastrophe. Maybe if the future was a disaster,
it would make sense that she would try to
prevent it, but as it stands, it doesn't make
sense that she'd try to stop the events that
create her own utopia.
The truth is, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
set up an impossible premise for Face the
Music to deliver on. It works in the first
film to say that sometime in the future, Bill
and Ted will write a song that brings about
universal peace and harmony, but that premise
breaks down when you have to show that song
in the third film. Music is subjective, which
means that there's no song anyone could write
that all audiences would buy as the song that
would save the world. Yet the entire plot
of Face the Music relies on Bill and Ted performing
such a song by the end of the film.
The solution to this problem turns out to
be surprisingly simple and elegant: it's not
about the song itself, but about humanity
uniting across time and space to create music
together. One of the main themes of the Bill
& Ted trilogy has always been about friends
and strangers working together to accomplish
great things. So even if the song itself isn't
entirely your jam, there's no need to suspend
disbelief, because as Thea and Billie explain
at the end of the film,
"It wasn't so much the song that made the
difference; it was everyone playing it together."
Bill & Ted movies have always marched to the
beat of their own drum in the logic department,
but the reasoning of Face the Music seems
a little nonsensical even by Bill & Ted standards.
First, there's the question of how none of
the future Bills and Teds seem to have any
knowledge of the 2020 concert until the Bill
and Ted from 2067, yet they all remember going
on the same time traveling journey that we
see play out in the film, as evidenced by
the 2025 Bill and Ted being able to hatch
an elaborate plan to try to deceive their
past selves.
There's also the issue of why Rufus seemed
to know exactly how and when Bill and Ted
would save the world, but then no one else
in the future did. The Great Leader seemed
to have no knowledge of how the concert came
about, who performed it, or what the song
sounded like. All she had was Rufus' information,
even though she had technology that put all
of time and space right at her fingertips.
Plus, how do any of these futures even exist
if all of reality collapsed in on itself in
2020? All of it adds up to a time travel plot
that mirrors the wackiness of the first film,
but lacks the internal cohesion. If Face the
Music wanted to play around with a bunch of
alternate realities, that could've been cool,
but it doesn't really work when the plot is
focused on maintaining a reality that already
exists.
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