Two Hour Glorified Music Video

Rating: 4/10 (20 October 2007)

This movie is one of the worst I've seen all year. The singing is fine, they did justice to every Beatles song they covered, and the filming of every song was very lovely to watch, so why didn't they just stick with that? The plot that they shoved in between the many songs was contrived and one dimensional. Every character was a bad 60's stereotype and there was little character development for anyone to even care. This is most notable in the fact that there are several characters whos origins, point in the film, and even names (which were all names from Beatles songs, so the joke got old after the 4th or 5th time), aren't revealed until after they sing a few songs that have no relevance to the movie (except, of course, that they're Beatles songs). Some "characters" were introduced just to throw out another song reference, and that was their entire role.
But what was most aggravating to me was that it didn't follow the one simple rule of musicals. The songs that are sung must advance the plot. In Across The Universe, the story line would halt, a song would be sung, and then the story line would pick up again where it had been left off. (The only exception is "Revolution" and "I Want You"...but we're talking 30 songs here) I understand that this is a little harder to do when the songs that are being sung wern't written specifically for the musical, but I know it can be done. Songs from Moulin Rouge were almost entirely covers, and the Broadway musicals Mamma Mia and Movin' Out are sung entirely of ABBA and Billy Joel songs, respectively. If someone can make an entire cohesive musical out of ABBA songs then using Beatles music should have been a no brainer.
Although I think thats the problem. Taymor knows that it's the Beatles, so no matter what you do to it, it'll be a hit. You don't need a brain to figure that one out.