Falls Short of Expectation

Rating: 7/10 (6 October 2007)

Across the Universe starts out with a really great concept, and ends up with a poor execution. First of all, it is at its very core: a musical. Musicals suffer from a very strange conundrum in that you are trying to tell a story almost entirely through music. Across the Universe limits itself by only utilizing the music of The Beatles.
This must have been an interesting challenge for the writers and I think, over all, they failed. The song choices are great though the situations they were presented in were, at best, strange and, at worst, horribly contrived and forced. Each individual scene and music number was very well done. However, the overall plot of the movie could have done without several of these scenes which too much time was spent on.
Additionally, there were far too many characters than were needed. Several of them could have been effectively combined with a little rewriting of the movie itself. For instance, get rid of the lesbian character and change Sadie's name to Prudence. Give her a scene where she has fallen victim to drugs and the "rocker" lifestyle and JoJo leaves her, she's dropped into an overdose induced coma: NOW the friends sing "Dear Prudence" to bring her back. JoJo returns and sings "I Want To Hold Your Hand".
Combine Bono's excellent character with the lame revolution leader. NOW you can believe the charisma. Now the pivotal character actually sings in the musical as he leads the revolutionaries on an acid induced pilgrimage as the Walrus.
Fire the sad Joe Cocker. Let Eddie Izzard do all that stuff, and keep him around as a "narrator" type character to help tie together lose ends when you decide to cut between fraying plot lines.
This movie was disjointed, had spastic timing, the visuals were grossly inconsistent, and, for a musical, it relied too heavily on forced dialog to allow me to enjoy it as a musical. It was filled with wonderful individual moments and scenes, but they just didn't all fit together comfortably.