Julie Taymor's Across the Universe is a bold experiment - an experiment gone terribly, horrifyingly wrong. It is an irritatingly inconsistent film that contains several brilliant sequences, but unfortunately not enough of them to keep the film from falling apart.
The story is this: Set during the 1960's, we follow several young people throughout their entrance into the new decade, amid the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. The film is structured as a semi-musical. Throughout the story, the characters frequently break into song - in this case, Beatles songs. Sounds great, right? It really, truly could have been. And worst of all, the first half of the movie is almost uniformly wonderful. One great sequence after another - a raucous dorm-room sing-a-long to "With a Little Help From My Friends", a breathtaking, immensely powerful re-imagining of "Let It Be" set amongst the Civil Rights Movement, and a darkly satirical take on "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" in which newly drafted soldiers are seen literally carrying the Statue of Liberty. I was also elated to see the inclusion of my favorite Beatles song, "I've Just Seen a Face".
Shortly after this, however, the film quickly spirals out of control. Any semblance of pacing completely goes out the window, as one agonizingly slow sequence follows another. Several early Beatles songs are re-composed as sparce, somber ballads, and while the changes were an interesting choice, there are simply way too many of them strung together. I've always seen the movie musical as the filmic equvilant of the mix-tape: start off with a bang, build up momentum, slow it down, and then alternate throughout the rest of the runtime with a similar sequence. The idea is to keep your listener listening, or, in this case, keep the viewer watching. By the end of the film, I didn't care. I just wanted to go home and listen to a real album, where the track order made some semblance of sense. The biggest problem with the music in the film is there's simply too many songs (34 in all) featured in the just over two-hour runtime. The Beatles-music idea was handled much better in I Am Sam (another film which uses covers of Beatles songs, as the original recordings are much too expensive to use).
One word of note: There are reports that the studio had attempted to take the film away from the director, Julie Taymor. While I'm not usually for that kind of thing, this is one case where it makes sense. The film is a complete mess in its second half. There are entire sequences here that could have been omitted. Particularly the horrible "I Am the Walrus" and "Mr. Kite!" scenes, which add nothing at all to the film. Taymor was reportedly under pressure to get the film under two hours, and she refused. Well, you could truthfully remove a half hour from this film and not even notice. This is one of the few cases where the studio was totally and completely right. Usually the studios are overstepping their bounds when they try to interfere. Usually. There are situations like The Magnificent Ambersons, and then there's this.
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