Despite visual invention, it lacks heart and ends up coming off like an expensive piece of pretentious amateur dramatics

Rating: Null/10 (16 February 2009)

Liverpudlian dock worker Jude travels to the US in the 1960's to find his estranged father. Once there he meets Max, which in turn leads him to fall for his sister Lucy. While Lucy and Jude move through the 1960's involved in the peace movement, Max is drafted and ends up in Vietnam.
So let me get this straight. I cannot buy The Beatles' music on iTunes but yet somehow permission was given to use that music in this film? If I'm right in that then the message from the owners of the rights is this: access to the original music = bad, music used in corny amateur dramatics = good. I know that is a bit of a simplification but it is difficult to see how this film came about in regards getting the rights to the music it so heavily uses. I can understand why some people love this film because it is visually creative and it aspires to create a large musical and artistic experience in charting America during the 60's and 70's all via the central love story of Jude and Lucy  few would deny that the film lacks ambition. However ambition is not the making of a film and the problem is here that it is not enough to carry it through all the problems.
The film lacks heart. I know many will disagree having been caught up in the creativity of it all but then some people cry and corny school plays so disagreement should not be taken as fact. The characters are one-dimensional and they get lost in the grand sweep of the film. So, OK, perhaps the film is carried on the grand sweep of history and the bigger picture? Well no, because this history is simplified down to Broadway song and dance numbers and none of it has resonance in the way one knows it should. As a result of this the cast are mostly left without anything to work with other than making sure they hit their musical cues and stand in the right spot for the camera. What this ends up meaning is that the entire film feels like high school amateur dramatics where everyone is slightly cheesy but very sincere, the songs are familiar but not as good as the original and the numbers all have a "lots of teeth and glad-hands" feel to them.
The film is visually creative in its imagination and its reference points but without heart this again makes it feel am-dram and, in combination with the treatment of the subject, all a bit pretentious. By the end of the film I was grateful for release because it had offered me nothing. I didn't care about the characters, I didn't get drawn into the musical numbers, the sweep of history was delivered with too little meaning and only the pretty pictures distracted me  but they were hollow as a result of the other failures. Across the Universe is generally well-liked on this site, I genuinely have no idea why because, visuals aside, the film plays like an expensive and pretentious piece of amateur dramatics.