Review of Across the Universe (2007) by Trystan C — 23 Jul 2012

There are millions of people who think or have said that The Beatles are one of, if not the, best bands ever in the history of popular music. I am one of these people. So when I saw the trailer for this movie about a half a year ago, I was naturally giddy and excited. I uttered to myself, what I assume most uttered to themselves after watching the trailer.

"A Beatles musical?? What could go wrong!?".

Let's talk about that.

Most musicals are full of songs written specifically to serve the story. This was the reverse, as the story had to serve the songs. What you get from that is a movie that goes off on desperate tangents in order to make the songs relevant. That's why we have a 5 minute scene where the rest of the characters try to get the closet-lesbian, Prudence, to literally come out of a closet just so they can use the song "Dear Prudence.".

You strip the songs away and all this is is another movie about 60's trying to affect people and say something about love and peace and growing up and not really doing any of it.

The visuals were good. The visuals were great in fact. But I'm not going to give a movie a great rating for great visuals. If that was the case, Fantastic Four would have got 5 stars.

I guess I was foolish to actually believe a movie could do The Beatles any kind of justice.