Julie Taymor's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Rating: 3/10 (13 December 2009)

The Beatles. Like them or not, you can certainly feel their mark on music history still to this day, whatever you listen to in most genres of music, you can hear their influence on music even today (coincidental or not). In fact, they're so good apparently that when you go to Hollywood executives to talk to them over a musical based on The Beatles' back catalogue, they'll go, "Sure! That's sounds totally original and amazing, here have the necessary money, have fun!" When in reality, this concept has been worked with 4 times before and unless it was done with the actual Beatles' co-operation, it never really worked ("Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" with the Bee Gees or "All This and World War II", anyone?).
But alas, the opportunity to make another Beatlemania movie came calling when the respectively-imaginative Julie Taymor ("Titus" and the stage musical version of "The Lion King") decided to weave a large string of Beatles classics together into a plot about a young transatlantic relationship in the 60's, under the passionate title of "Across the Universe".
Now, you'll be forgiven for thinking this movie would be absolutely incredible because it looked so astonishingly fantastic in the trailer (and it does). But it turns out that it shares two things trailers might have that can be problematic to the enjoyment of the movie: 1) They picked the best parts of the movie and 2) The trailer itself is even better than the movie! Well, ish...the movie itself has some very nice things about it, most of these things are especially noticeable and done well in the first half. The visual design is very appealing, the choreography is exceptional when it's being used to it's full and when special effects are used (in particular, Uncle Sam in the scene featuring "I Want You (She's So Heavy)"), they're pulled off quite decently. However, that's all that can be said over definite positives.
The main problem with the movie is that it can't decide whether it's telling a story or it just wants to be a straight-up musical. Or what mood it's supposed to use. The first part is the most consistent part of the movie, although there's still a lot of inconsistencies and some interesting parts of the story that end up being completely forgotten and tossed over for the cliché boy-meets-girl standard and bad attempts at outdated political commentary.
The middle part is the strangest part of the movie but is also the most odd-to-receive part. You're mean't to take it on as "Oh that's weird, ha-ha" but sometimes, it doesn't actually feel right in the context of the movie at all. I feel sorry for Bono as he has to deal with one of the most embarrassing cameos I've ever seen, as a guy who's supposed to be something of a ultra-psychedelia genius but just comes off as a bad Willy Wonka who even in the 60's would fail at being "hip", although of course the characters swoon over him anyway before his 8 minutes of screen time suddenly ends. Eddie Izzard however is fantastic as Mr. Kite and hosts a very entertaining and imaginative sequence, but sadly his screen time in the movie is even shorter and there's zero explanation to the scene and zero explanation to how the characters came back to normality.
Third act is the worst. Clunky, irritating and surprisingly boring. Hardly anything flows any more, the songs performed start becoming monotonous (apart from "As My Guitar Gently Weeps", with Martin Luther's smooth, soulful vocals and beautiful acoustic guitar having to serve as background music to a character's unnecessary rant over sound equipment) and there's a lot of scenes where it's wise to emote with the characters but because there's no real emotion driven into the main character's two-dimensional personalities or into how the actors should emote, everything comes off as awkward instead. I ended up actually wanting to speed the movie up so I can get to more interesting parts or for the movie to just end so I can stop wasting my time.
Overall, in my opinion this movie has good merit and potential to be quite good and some parts do have a sprinkling of good quirks and some inspired visuals. But overall, it feels too much like a movie made as a homework assignment than a fully-fledged major inspired production. Also, the Beatles covers are very hit ("Let it Be", "Benifit of Mr. Kite", .etc.) and miss (most of them as a lot of them sound the same). Which is a real shame as Julie Taymor is a fantastic visionary and she had to waste it on this. Good luck with "The Tempest", Julie, hope it makes up for this disappointing journey here!
3.5/10