'Hair was bad enough, but this is a load of dandruff.'

Rating: 1/10 (26 October 2007)

I can't better Philip French's dismissal (above) of this film (from his 'Observer' column). I am embarrassed for Ms Taymor, who - on the evidence of 'Titus' and 'Frida' - is a hugely talented filmmaker.
But here the director's talents are only intermittently diverting, and cannot save what is an utterly pointless project.
As 'versions' of the originals the songs are often attractively delivered, though too often with a bland professionalism that entirely lacks any edge. The Gospel choir, and perhaps some of 'Sadie''s numbers, are quite powerful in themselves, but even these positive examples hardly rate a notice in the context of what heights cinema musicals have already hit. The song-and-dance routines - though fanatically well disciplined (as if that would subdue all opposition!) - are uniformly appalling, and would have instantly bombed on the stage of any professional theatre. They are all manic energy without real engagement.
It does not help that all the characters are annoyingly and rather dishonestly tangential to historical reality - like a reminiscence of the great originals ('Jude' = 'Paul Macartney', 'Sadie' = 'Janis Joplin' for instance), or merely inserted as an incarnation of a song (the otherwise pointless 'Prudence'), or of something wildly trippy in a cartoonish way (a brilliant Eddie Izzard completely wasted in a misfiring farrago entirely bereft of any identification with the hippy ethos - to call it 'pastiche' would be to wildly over-praise it).
Even the more 'down-to-earth' scenes back in Liverpool lack any substance at all: Even the Albert Docks location looks as gentrified here as it has become in reality, at the hands of the property developers. (One would have expected the well-known team of British writers to have got this right, at least.) In fact the whole picture suffers from a total failure to identify with the time and culture it is feverishly and showily pursuing.
And the more it pursues, the further off is that authentic psychedelic rainbow.
Perhaps Julie Taymor is in pursuit of her own lost girlhood, which would explain the self-indulgence in the unspeakably trite American family clichés ... But surely better, in such a case, that she should have created or commissioned a more focused screenplay: This one seems hopelessly hung-up on squeezing in the absolute max. of Beatles songs.
And we don't even get a decent pastiche of Dick Lester's witty style of early Beatles' music-video, for God's sake! Humour is indeed direly lacking - how the team of Clement and la Frenais, the writers of the gloriously funny and characterful 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' saga, could ever agree to pen this flat, bland, po-faced, Americanisation of a major part of their own popular cultural heritage from the industrial North of England is beyond me! And the hyper-Hollywood style of 'musical number' sits very ill with the naivety at the heart of the subject. The truth is, I am afraid, that the film is ludicrously over-ambitious in terms of mere personal grandstanding by the director at her most showy: 'Look at me, isn't this brilliant?' Actually, 'No, Ms Taymor.' As director she neither reveals nor evokes any love for her subject. It is indeed a really stupid movie, whose ambition is all for the perfection of the surfaces, but which possesses not one spark of inspiration whatsoever.
But the biggest mistake of all was to portray the whole era as some kind of alternative reality, existing 'Across the Universe,' which actually lacks inspiration and magic in direct proportion to its distance from the original milieu that inspired the songs (a kind of Anti-Oz one might say). Crucially, since the film's entire mise en scene is set neither in any convincing 'then' nor in any engaging 'now' it is difficult to see what possible relevance or attraction it possesses for any audience.
Taymor has been lost in this No-Man's-Land, which is the result of exposing the inadequate simplicities of the sketchy plot to the whole industrial panoply of Hollywood: She wanders through a scene of artistic devastation, amongst groves of burnt-out and songless trees. And were that (or something like) a defining image of her own creation, we might at least have had a half-decent anti-war movie! As it is, even Cliff Richard's safe old 'Summer Holiday' vehicle seems more relevant and punchy.
And what sublime madness could a Ken Russell in his reprobate heyday have wrought with such a subject ....! But we torment ourselves with such 'might-have-beens.' Or rather, these things have been before, and far better done, and there was absolutely no reason for this film to exist in the first place. It is a completely misbegotten enterprise and will be utterly forgotten by next week, if not sooner.