There’s a certain predictability to the criticism around ‘Michael’, the kind that always shows up when an icon as vast and complicated as Michael Jackson is brought back to the screen. The debates aren’t new: representation, selective storytelling, the ethics of myth-making. We’ve heard them before. But somewhere beyond that noise sits a quieter, more honest truth, one that explains why the film still connects the way it does.

Because for a lot of us, Millennials, Gen Z “Western culture” wasn’t some abstract, academic idea. It had a face. A voice. A rhythm. And that rhythm was Michael Jackson. Long before streaming blurred borders, his music had already done it. You didn’t need to be in Los Angeles or New York to feel him. You just needed imagination.

Those concerts we watched in low resolution, or heard about like folklore, they weren’t just performances. People getting unconscious in his concerts out of happiness, all these felt distant, almost unreal. Like something you were never going to experience, but would always wish you had.

And that’s exactly where ‘Michael’ works.

It’s not trying too hard to be a perfect documentation of a life. It’s doing something else, something more emotional. It becomes a bridge. For those who never stood in a stadium waiting for that silhouette under the spotlight, the film gives you a version of it. It pulls something far away a little closer.

Yes, the criticism about spectacle is fair. Yes, it may soften certain edges of Jackson’s story. But reducing the film only to what it leaves out misses the point of what it actually gets right, the scale of his presence, and more importantly, the intimacy of his connection with people across the world.

Because Michael Jackson was never just a performer. For many of us, he was an introduction to a bigger world, to a different imagination of culture, to a sense of belonging that crossed borders. “Western style” didn’t come from textbooks, it came from trying the moonwalk in your room, memorising lyrics, or dreaming of a concert you knew you’d probably never attend.

Seen like this, Michael isn’t really a biopic in the strict sense. It’s closer to a memory. A shared one. It’s trying to capture a feeling, the chaos, the almost unreal bond between artist and audience. And in doing that, it naturally chooses experience over interrogation.

Maybe that’s why people are accepting it the way they are. Not because it answers every question around Jackson, but because it taps into something deeper. Cultural icons aren’t remembered through footnotes. They’re remembered through feeling.

And for those of us who grew up seeing Michael Jackson as our window to the world, Michael doesn’t just tell a story, it lets us live a version of a dream we were always watching from a distance.