The Best Musical of 2007, Best War Film of 2007, but not without its quirks...

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2007)

Let me begin by saying that this film is brave, timely and poignant and I love it to pieces. However, I concur with the other reviewers who have had slightly mixed feelings. The key to producing good musicals, especially now that the art form's pinnacle of popularity in the golden studio era of the 50s is an entire half-century past, is to maintain the audience's suspension of disbelief. In that respect, Across the Universe is exceedingly clever, transitioning with choreographed precision between what one might call diagetic and nondiagetic moments- "real" scenes and dance numbers. For example, football players careening and colliding in front and behind the protagonist of the moment gracefully transpose into dancers, flipping and tumbling yet still retaining a style of movement consistent with the football theme.
The visual style of the film echos the innocence of Hairspray in earlier moments, and the colorful melodrama of Moulin Rouge in its representation of the Beatles' later more political work, as the politics of the film begin to cement. Smart editing in the opening sequence creates graphic matches, carefully balancing newspapers atop crashing waves. An army boot camp montage splits individual body parts into separate boxes, suggesting the dehumanization by fragmentation (Full Metal Jacket?) that takes place to create soldiers. Strawberries are grenades, bombs, bloody masses sacrificed to the war on terror --strike that-- the war against Communism. Yet in some scenes, all the visual trickery loses its place, and doesn't quite live up to our expectations of sensory overload the circus scene somehow seems too thin and too out of context for its own intentions.
The film contains some of the most innovative set, lighting and costume designs I've ever seen- Max's abduction into the military comes to mind. Floors slide unexpectedly, hospital beds flip with Busby Berkeley precision. Soldiers march over a scale-model of Vietnamese jungle carrying a heavy Statue of Liberty. Many pieces surpass Dream Girls in their ambition and pure bravado. The budget, clearly many multiples larger than Hairspray's, lends itself well to the rendition of the Beatles' music, and the action is indeed impeccably matched to the visuals and emotional pitch of the plot. There's even some surprising re-casting of songs to suggest alternates to literal readings, ie "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" about loneliness.
But there are exceptions- the bowling alley scene falls particularly flat, as does an elating but contrived vision of "Dear Prudence" (could that effect be any more cliché?). The plot also occasionally hits a rough patch, failing to sufficiently motivate Jude's animosity towards Lucy, and skipping awkwardly around the issues surrounding Prudence (is she Vietnamese? Were the filmmakers timid about offending the audience by exploring her sexuality in a less roundabout, under-the-radar kind of way?) and Jude's father. The emotional weight of the film takes longer to develop than it should, leaving audiences to spend the first 20 minutes wondering if they'll care about the characters or not.
Despite these quirks, Across the Universe is the kind of film I have been waiting with bated breath for a brave filmmaker to take on. Its characters are not literally the Beatles or Janis Joplin, nor the actual characters described in the Beatles' music, they are in effect *metacharacters*- stand ins for ideas, people who embody the ethos of a generation, and by proxy, a suggestion on the direction of our own. The film repoliticizes and recontexualizes the Beatles' music for a new generation, allowing us to understand both the original context of the work, and its pointed applicability now. Comparable to Apocalypse Now in its timely, subtle and yet provocative objection to a war without end, Across The Universe asks a new generation to take up the struggle passed to it by their spiritual predecessors. It is a brave and elegant statement, despite its quirks and oversights, well deserving of a wide and receptive audience.