What’s It About
At 11:30pm on October 11th, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television forever. Find out what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Saturday Night is a film based on the initiation of the famous TV show Saturday Night Live. It focuses on its very first episode, which started to stream on October 11, 1975. Meanwhile, this show has remained on TV, entertaining people every Saturday night for almost half a century long. This movie took us behind the show to show all the crazy things that went on before it went live. It was a very stressful time for everyone involved. The actors and crew were running around, trying to get everything ready. They had to deal with lots of problems, big and small. One of the main things the movie shows is how the people worked together. Even though they were stressed and sometimes argued, they all wanted the show to succeed. That energy, that excitement of that night – the bravery and the determination, even when it was bad – get across in this film. Jason Reitman had done a great job with making this movie appear quite realistic and exciting. The camera movements make you feel like you are there in the studio. It follows a number of actors and crew running up and down hallways and rooms, getting ready for the show. It really gives an idea of how many people are involved in making a live TV show work. The editing of the movie is superb; it’s fast-paced, meaning scenes pop up one after another very fast. That would create this feeling of rush and excitement, just as the real night should have gone. The music in the movie made the impression of all that was going on around them even bigger. One of the best things about Saturday Night is the actors. They play real people who were part of the original Saturday Night Live cast. These actors did a great job of becoming the famous comedians they were playing. For example, Cory Michael Smith plays Chevy Chase. He shows how confident and sometimes arrogant Chase is. Matt Wood plays John Belushi. He captures Belushi’s wild energy and big emotions. Ella Hunt plays Gilda Radner. She shows both Radner’s funny characters and her kind personality. Other actors who did a really good job include Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Tommy Dewey as Donoghue, Andrew Barth Feldman as Neil Levy, and Kim Matula as Jane Curtain. The movie doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining who these people are or telling their life stories. Instead, it focuses on what happened that one night. We see the famous comedy sketches being put together and performed for the first time. The main characters in the movie are Lorne Michaels, played by Gabriel LaBelle, and Rosie Shuster, played by Rachel Sennott. Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live and is still in charge of it today. The movie shows how he stayed calm even when everything seemed to be going wrong. One funny part of the movie shows John Belushi dressed as a bumblebee, but he goes missing right before he’s supposed to be on stage. This is the kind of problem that can happen in live TV, and the movie shows how the crew dealt with it. Saturday Night makes people feel nostalgic, which means it makes them think fondly about the past. For people who watched Saturday Night Live when it first started, the movie brings back memories of what the show used to be like. Even for younger viewers who didn’t see the original shows, it gives a sense of how exciting and new it was at the time. The movie is like watching a play in some ways. It mostly takes place in one building, and a lot of the emotions comes from watching the actors talk to each other and solve problems. But it’s not boring – there’s always something happening. One of the interesting things about the movie is that it shows how different TV was in the 1970s. The comedy on the first episode of Saturday Night Live was very daring for its time. The movie hints at how the show pushed boundaries and did things that other TV shows weren’t doing. Saturday Night does a good job of showing how hard it is to make a live TV show. It takes a lot of people working together, from the actors on stage to the camera operators to the people in charge of costumes and makeup. The movie makes you appreciate all the work that goes into making a show like this. The film also captures the spirit of taking risks and trying new things. In 1975, no one knew if Saturday Night Live would be successful. The people making it were mostly young and not very famous. But they believed in what they were doing and worked hard to make it happen. Ultimately, Saturday Night is not about a television show; it’s about people working together to try something new and fresh. It is a story of how creativity, labor, and chance intersect at one moment in time to give birth to something that would survive for decades. It is a film celebrating the fact that these people tried something different when the outcomes were not guaranteed.
OUR RATING – A WEEKEND 8.5