Apparently filmed using a kaleidoscope...

Rating: 8/10 (21 October 2007)

Julie Taymor's new movie has been getting somewhat middling reviews (on the high end, the all-father of critics, Roger Ebert, gave it four stars and said it was the only movie at the Festival that he saw twice), and I can see both sides of the coin, although I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.
The film is a musical set in the 1960s, following various characters through the various signature features of the era (student activism/militancy, anti-war protests, the civil rights movement, the draft/Vietnam, the sexual revolution, drug culture), all set to over thirty Beatles songs. Pretty much all the characters are named after characters in said songs: Jude, Lucy, Max, Prudence, Sadie, etc. Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a Liverpool dockworker who decides to go to America sort of on a whim, and ends up meeting Max (Joe Anderson), and then Max's family, including his sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). Jude falls in love with Lucy ("She's got a boyfriend." "That's alright. I've got a girlfriend."), and eventually everyone ends up living in New York, in a single apartment populated by a bunch of other characters, including an Asian lesbian runaway named Prudence and two singers modeled on Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The plot isn't particularly important (one of the main criticisms of the film in reviews). The movie is all about the songs.
On the subject of the music, a lot of the really big Beatles tunes are absent here, and even having a character named after one doesn't necessarily mean it gets in (Maxwell does wield a hammer at one point, but the song itself is absent). I had never heard of a lot of them (my knowledge of the Beatles isn't particularly deep). Everybody can sing quite well, and Sturgess and Wood have good romantic chemistry. Since this is a Taymor film, the visuals tend towards the quite extravagant, often going to full-blown music video rather than musical in the traditional sense ("Strawberry Fields Forever" particularly). One thing that I really liked was that Across the Universe is quite unequivocally a musical where people burst into song; one of the problems I had with Dreamgirls was that for a long time it was ambiguous about whether or not the characters were just singing the songs on stage or were actually in a musical, so that it was jarring when the film started to have characters singing conversationally.
And this movie has Bono show up as a hippie guru singing "I Am The Walrus", which sequence appears to have been filmed using a kaleidoscope; and not one, not two, but five Salma Hayeks as sexy nurses at a VA hospital.