'Across the Universe' Falls Flat
Courtesy Sony Pictures
Grade: D-
By STEWART SMITH
TylerPaper.com
If there’s one thing that I came away from “Across the Universe” with, it’s that the music of The Beatles would make for a fantastic musical.
It’s too bad then that such a wonderful catalogue of amazing songs was wasted on this. “Across the Universe” is a shell of a film. It’s admirable and undoubtedly bold to attempt a movie about the Vietnam War set to nothing but The Beatles’ music, but in this case it’s a concept that needs to be more than the sum of its parts to really make it a worthwhile endeavor on any level.
The story, such as it is, follows three kids as they go from bright-eyed, optimistic youths to dreary, pessimistic young adults who are caught up in the political and social revolution going on during the Vietnam War. Jude (Jim Sturges) is a British dock worker who comes to America to find his dad and meets up with Max (Joe Anderson), a disillusioned Ivy League college student and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) who is waiting on pins and needles for her high school sweetheart to come back from the war. The three eventually find themselves in various states of involvement with either the war or the protest of it.
There’s certainly room for these characters to be interesting and dynamic, but only a couple of them manage to engage you at various points throughout, so there’s little to chew on once you’ve taken a bite of the rather bombastic visual tone the film takes on from time to time. It’s empty despite managing to truly capture the fervor and passion of that era. This might have been helped if these characters (most of whom I wouldn’t be able to remember their names were they not named after various Beatles songs) were given anything substantial to do or even say. They mostly just float from scene to scene with only a little bit of peripheral action to do as they go from musical number to musical number.
And that’s if they’re lucky. Some of these characters will pop in and out of the film with little to no reasoning as to why they left or came back or are even in the movie at all.
Some of the musical numbers are stirring and really add a nice texture to the scenes, as is the case with “Let It Be,” which is sung by a young boy (who is caught in the middle of a riot in Detroit) and a Gospel choir. Others are just plain bizarre (you haven’t seen anything until you watch hobos, prostitutes and a pimp sing and dance in the streets to “Come Together”). And then there’s some that just kind of seem shoehorned in because the director really wanted to fit the song in there, as is the case with “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite,” which seems to have an, at best, tenuous connection to what happened in the scene leading into it.
I guess the film’s director, Julie Taymor (whose past efforts include “Frida” and the rather delirious 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Titus”), was hoping the songs would flesh out the gaps in story and character development and some of the time it works but, as was stated earlier, it’s incredibly uneven. In fact, uneven is likely the best description one could give for this. You certainly see moments of inspiration throughout, but those moments are so unevenly spread that it makes the moments that lack that spark all the more dull and plodding.
Let me finish by saying I went into “Across the Universe” rooting for it. I really wanted to like it. The material behind it is certainly deserving enough of a good film and maybe there’s one there that I’m just not seeing. But for the most part it just falls flat.
Across the Universe is showing at the Times Square Cinema in Tyler.
Stewart Smith is a copy editor with the Tyler Paper as well as a burgeoning film critic and aspiring film historian. He may be reached at simplystew@yahoo.com.
Updated Friday, Dec. 7, 2007 at 1:16 p.m. CST
TylerPaper.com
If there’s one thing that I came away from “Across the Universe” with, it’s that the music of The Beatles would make for a fantastic musical.
It’s too bad then that such a wonderful catalogue of amazing songs was wasted on this. “Across the Universe” is a shell of a film. It’s admirable and undoubtedly bold to attempt a movie about the Vietnam War set to nothing but The Beatles’ music, but in this case it’s a concept that needs to be more than the sum of its parts to really make it a worthwhile endeavor on any level.
The story, such as it is, follows three kids as they go from bright-eyed, optimistic youths to dreary, pessimistic young adults who are caught up in the political and social revolution going on during the Vietnam War. Jude (Jim Sturges) is a British dock worker who comes to America to find his dad and meets up with Max (Joe Anderson), a disillusioned Ivy League college student and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) who is waiting on pins and needles for her high school sweetheart to come back from the war. The three eventually find themselves in various states of involvement with either the war or the protest of it.
There’s certainly room for these characters to be interesting and dynamic, but only a couple of them manage to engage you at various points throughout, so there’s little to chew on once you’ve taken a bite of the rather bombastic visual tone the film takes on from time to time. It’s empty despite managing to truly capture the fervor and passion of that era. This might have been helped if these characters (most of whom I wouldn’t be able to remember their names were they not named after various Beatles songs) were given anything substantial to do or even say. They mostly just float from scene to scene with only a little bit of peripheral action to do as they go from musical number to musical number.
And that’s if they’re lucky. Some of these characters will pop in and out of the film with little to no reasoning as to why they left or came back or are even in the movie at all.
Some of the musical numbers are stirring and really add a nice texture to the scenes, as is the case with “Let It Be,” which is sung by a young boy (who is caught in the middle of a riot in Detroit) and a Gospel choir. Others are just plain bizarre (you haven’t seen anything until you watch hobos, prostitutes and a pimp sing and dance in the streets to “Come Together”). And then there’s some that just kind of seem shoehorned in because the director really wanted to fit the song in there, as is the case with “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite,” which seems to have an, at best, tenuous connection to what happened in the scene leading into it.
I guess the film’s director, Julie Taymor (whose past efforts include “Frida” and the rather delirious 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Titus”), was hoping the songs would flesh out the gaps in story and character development and some of the time it works but, as was stated earlier, it’s incredibly uneven. In fact, uneven is likely the best description one could give for this. You certainly see moments of inspiration throughout, but those moments are so unevenly spread that it makes the moments that lack that spark all the more dull and plodding.
Let me finish by saying I went into “Across the Universe” rooting for it. I really wanted to like it. The material behind it is certainly deserving enough of a good film and maybe there’s one there that I’m just not seeing. But for the most part it just falls flat.
Across the Universe is showing at the Times Square Cinema in Tyler.
Stewart Smith is a copy editor with the Tyler Paper as well as a burgeoning film critic and aspiring film historian. He may be reached at simplystew@yahoo.com.
Updated Friday, Dec. 7, 2007 at 1:16 p.m. CST
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