BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky Review

Popstar documentaries like Justin Bieber’s YouTube series Seasons and Taylor Swift’s Netflix film Miss Americana are always crowd-pleasers, fan-fodder, and almost guaranteed marketing successes -- the timing of the premieres of these series and films often coincides with the release of new music, with Bieber’s album Intentions and Swift’s single “Only the Young” being released alongside their respective documentaries. K-pop sensation Blackpink’s BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky is no different, premiering on Netflix just two weeks after the release of their first full album, simply titled The Album. But the thing about these documentaries is this: sometimes they’re actually pretty good. I like to get pretentious in my writing when it comes to these reviews, but truly, if I were to describe Light Up the Sky in three words, they’d be “actually pretty good.” But of course, I’ll elaborate.

If by chance you’ve been either living under a rock, or just only listen to rock music or whatever other genre, and aren’t familiar with Blackpink, I’ll give you a quick introduction. Blackpink is a Korean pop girl group under the label YG Entertainment, consisting of 4 members: Jennie, Rosé, Jisoo, and Lisa. They debuted back in 2016 with the single “Boombayah”, and up until this year with the release of The Album, their label has allowed them only single releases, far and few between. Despite this though, they’ve had massive success internationally, just this week being named the world’s biggest musical act by Bloomberg’s Pop Star Power Rankings list and the music video for “Kill This Love” becoming the fastest K-pop music video to reach 1.1 billion views. Their album was one of the most hyped and long-awaited musical releases this year, and while I don’t know nearly enough about musical production and composition to speak about the album in any capacity beyond “I thought it was pretty fun, albeit somewhat predictable”, I do feel like I can give good criticism on its promotional documentary.

Light Up the Sky, directed by the talented Caroline Suh, recounts Blackpink’s rise to the top and stresses each member’s individuality. While it can feel in certain places very polished, like it’s only scratching the surface of larger issues that feel sugar-coated just enough to be digestible, that’s due likely in large part to the documentary being produced by YG Entertainment themselves -- though the movie does not gloss over its depiction the girls performing for steel-eyed executives and their accounts of how grueling the process of training and elimination was. The documentary shines (like the stars, if we’re continuing to use lyrics from “How You Like That”) when it delves into and explores the humanity of each member; this is a running theme with these popstar biopics, but it hits especially hard in a K-pop biopic, especially since K-pop is not a particularly freeing creative medium. In a way, this documentary is more exciting than The Album because of its authenticity. Blackpink’s image is all about the cross-section between cute and badass, but if we pull back the curtain, we’re left with vulnerability, which is much more compelling. The admission that they’re still learning to have fun on stage, the fear that they’re already en route to be replaced by a younger girl group, the question of why someone would see them as role models: it’s a solemn reminder that we must always consider what happens behind the scenes of our favorite popular media. Though I’ll happily bop to “DDU-DU DDU-DU” any day of the week, I’ll also be reminded every time I listen to it, or any other Blackpink song, just how much hardship went for the group to even see the light of day.

That being said, these hardships they still are not the focal point of the film: given that this documentary was clearly made for international, especially American audiences, with American news anchors and TV personalities talking about K-pop in the opening shots of the film and the language barrier being a key point in the film’s discussion, the crux of the film is Blackpink’s performance at last year’s Coachella -- the first K-pop group ever to do so. While this is a big step not just for Blackpink but for K-pop itself, it feels out-of-place in this documentary -- especially since we check in on the production of The Album later on anyway.