GET BACK: The Fabs get the run of The Shire.

More baggage than the Titanic for this one. The original project famously went sloppy and kept shrinking in scope from a desert amphitheatre to the roof of the building they were in, from raw and natural to basic but polished. The biggest musical act in the world were voluntarily recorded on film as well as tape trying to finish songs for a project that followed everything they'd done from Revolver to then with newness. Only a few months from their mammoth self-titled set they set out to get even closer to their own origins and then celebrate that with a live performance, a kind of Ninja White Album. The rest is history.

I first saw Let it Be in my mid teens at the end of the '70s. I kind of knew that what I was seeing happened before the Abbey Road album but definitely knew it had been released after so I could never quite dislodge the idea that I was watching The Beatles disintegrate in front of me. I saw this in cinemas in Townsville a few times so the effect of this documentary of demise was profound.

Since then, the bootleg industry has surfed on tides of rarity (some of it genuine) and threads of revision have been woven into the story, creating many different narratives. However diverse these could get they persistently rested on the legend of the dying rock band. The Anthology series and CDs offered the gems of the jams at unprecedented quality and then there was the revisionist Let it Be Naked CD which was resolutely not bad. The fuss that was later made for the releases of Pepper, White, Abbey Road seemed overgrown when it came to this project with its thin sound set in Franco Cozzo cushions of gold lurex by Phil Spector. But there it was, a big CD/Blu-Ray set, a book and now this new film presentation which, itself, is borne on years of hype. Haven't we had enough?

When is the world going to have enough of The Beatles? They are sold to every new generation who buy them up like disaster necessities. Yes, of course I ponied up for the Super Deluxe record with its Dolby Atmos mix (wrote about that here). And, yes, of course, I watched every last second of the three installment Peter Jackson recut, too. Spoiler alert: Twickenham is boring because they're bored, Saville Row is much better because Billy Preston and the rooftop is completely bloody glorious. Worth the wait and the viewing time? Definitely. Would I get the super uber ultra 4K box set? Depends what's on it and how much it is. While my honorary suburban dad's delight at high-res audio made the BD of Let it Be a no brainer the prospect of getting physical copies of Get Back as drab as the thought of buying the book dedicated to it. Why?

Well, just as travel documentaries really ought to stress the importance of waiting (as it's the single largest element) prospective fans should approach Get Back with some awareness that Peter Jackson represents this so well that, despite knowing how much more he could have included (he had days of footage to choose from), you are frequently grinding your teeth at how much failed action you are witnessing. Someone starts a jam on a song idea and someone else takes it up but it rolls over and gets back under the sheets for a few more minutes. This is the kind of thing that happens in a band as a matter of course. Songs might come from a divine visitation in the night but arranging them and teaching them to the others takes a lot of time spent going over the same things for whole afternoons. When I did this I used to do the arrangements in my head and practice was when I'd test what worked and what didn't. But getting the whole band in on it always took hours. And it should. 

But watching even the most watchable of rock bands do this is only marginally superior an experience to watching anyone else do it. Yoko Ono, sitting by John Lennon, eyes downcast and quietly breathing, clearly would rather be outside skipping a rope or chasing Jehova's Witnesses down the street with a meat cleaver. This is the Beatles as Tarkovsky might have imagined them. Jean Luc Godard still gets flack for his political interventions in the movie about The Stones coming up with Sympathy for the Devil but, apart from their function as comparison to the effectiveness of the rock band (working something through and getting it fiery and magnificent vs repeating dogma and performing meaningless weapons drills) he keeps it under two hours on screen and shows a clear through-line. Jackson's quest for truth here will frustrate the most firmly rusted-on fan. And it should.

It should because there is no better way to humanise culturally forged legends than to show the process and for real. People have been referring to McCartney coming up with Get Back while chugging along on his bass as pulling it out of thin air but to me it looks like he's running through something that he's been thinking about for days and is now just putting playable form on it. Lennon isn't there. Ringo likes what he's hearing. Harrison can't stop yawning. Soon after it's sounding almost exactly like part of the canon. Paul jamming it into a sketch is not the marvel, the band forming it into a rock song is, and that would apply to anyone else, as well. And that is the beauty of this series. We don't need them vomiting from a shot of smack or hustling groupies to humanise them but if we see them at work, doing their jobs the way we do every day we clock in we begin to understand. Rock bands, even the most revered, are work.

My own highlights do include Paul sketching out Get Back but also the moment we see Billy Preston find his keyboard part for I've Got a Feeling which lifts it into joy. Lennon and McCartney singing the harmonies of Two of Us at each other through grimaces is funny enough to sustain what might have felt like too much screen time. Paul holding back tears as the inevitability of the oncoming breakup becomes clear. The extended sequence from the orginal Let it Be film in which George is helping Ringo write Octopus's Garden shows him much more nurturing than before where he seemed to be mocking Ringo. George working out Old Brown Shoe at the piano and asking Billy what chord he'd stumbled on. And so much more.

But the star of the many hours of the series is the rooftop concert. Shown in full 4x3 and often in wide split screen we not only get all the repeated goes at a few of the songs and all the banter in the right place but the vox pops of the passers by down on the street are extended to really give a sense of the moment, the fashions, the values, look and feel of London on a freezing January day. And the threaded comedy of the two constables sent to turn the noise down is frequently side splitting as they get stuck in a purgatory of stalling by Apple staff and then ... well, that would be a spoiler (not a big dramatic one but one worth seeing fresh once). Some of the takes are ragged but you are watching what a decent rock band can sound like with practice and crafted arrangements. In the end they sound good, really good.

I'm glad Jackson was asked to do this and then went to the extent he did. If there are moments where the mismatch between audio and video make it look like he's contriving conversations that didn't happen quite that way it deos eventually feel like he's using either element to fill in the other as the point gets made. But if you go in go in prepared to live through the stifling ennui of inertia and repetition that creative workers have to go through to get to their works. If you accept that you will be rewarded with this vision of the reward at the end of concentrated and concerted effort by a group of friends who, tried as they have become of each other, knuckled under and got it done. And they're The Beatles.