Instead of watching it, try listening to a real Beatles album.

Rating: 2/10 (14 May 2008)

Across the Universe is a musical set in a world where The Beatles don't exist but everybody constantly sings Beatles songs. I say that The Beatles don't exist because surly somebody would have said, "Instead of listening to all these Beatles covers, why don't we just listen to the originals?" Covering Beatles songs is a very difficult task - one which this movie mostly fails - because the original songs are so good, it is hard to add anything original and new to them. What is more difficult is trying to cram 20 or so Beatles songs into a movie that is trying to maintain a cohesive plot. This leads to a lot of points in the movie where you think to yourself "What does this singing and dancing sequence have anything at all to do with what's going on?" The plot is really simplistic and unoriginal, though it obviously only exists to fill in the moments when the people aren't singing, however, I have to admit that the acting is pretty good. But every time a character uttered a line like "Hi, my name is Prudence" or "This is my sister, Lucy" I cringed at the thought of hearing another poorly covered song about them. I did think that the actor who played Jude was pretty good, but that's mostly because he did a very good Paul McCartney impression while singing.
Overall the movie was long, boring, and pointless. Though I applaud the film makers for being able to make U2's Bono (playing the role of Dr. Robert) look like even more of a douche bag than he already is.