The Beatles: Get Back, directed by Peter Jackson. Apple Corps and Wing-Nut Films, 2021. 468 minutes.

The first episode of The Beatles: Get Back debuted on November 25, 2021 -- which might be the only undeniable certainty of the endeavor. The three-episode docuseries enjoyed near-universal acclaim, sweeping almost every awards competition in which it was nominated, including the collection of five coveted Primetime Emmy Awards. The Beatles: Get Back was directed by Peter Jackson, the esteemed filmmaker behind The Lord of the Kings trilogy (2001-3) and They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), a visual masterwork about the First World War and the director's debut as a documentarian. For the latter project, Jackson drew upon original, largely unseen footage housed in the archives of London's Imperial War Museum. Working with materials that were more than a century old, Jackson and his team painstakingly restored the footage to afford twenty-first-century audiences a soldier's-eye view of the Great War.

In its extended cut, They Shall Not Grow Old clocked in at 129 minutes. As Jackson's sophomore documentary, The Beatles: Get Back dwarfed the World War I epic at 468 minutes. For Jackson, making sense of the project proved to be a Herculean task. The extant evidence includes more than 60 hours of film footage and some 150 hours of audio--all of which had been captured by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and producer Glyn Johns back in January 1969. For the Beades, the Get Back project has long existed as an oudier among the group's corpus of musical achievements. Even so, all of the usual hallmarks of their unparalleled success are in evidence: later refashioned as Let It Be (1970), the LP scored multiplatinum sales, along with three chart-topping singles in "Get Back," "Let It Be," and "The Long and Winding Road."

But the project also proved to be vexed from the start. During the January 1969 production, the Beatles pointedly shifted their focus from the concept of documenting what would have been their first live concerts in three years to a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the group's latest LP. Part of the uncertainty over the project's execution was clearly due to their dissatisfaction with working in the cavernous Twickenham Film Studios, followed by technical challenges associated with a mid-month shift to Apple Studios, located in the basement of their office building at 3 Savile Row. And then there was the issue of shifting personnel. George Martin, the group's regular producer since their EMI studio debut in June 1962, had been shunted aside in favor of Johns. Meanwhile, George Harrison was facing intense challenges in his personal life, while also contending with his second-tier status within the band's musical hierarchy. Finally, when the time came to make the move from Twickenham to Apple, the Beatles' technological guru Alexis Mardas--a two-bit fraudster known as Magic Alex within the band's circle--utterly failed in his quest to build out a cutting-edge recording facility, forcing Martin to rally EMI's technical corps to outfit the basement studio with...