Nerd Mentality

Across the Universe

Posted March 26th 2008 by Jordan Mammo.

Watching Across the Universe on DVD was not on the top of my list of things to do recently. It wasn't even at the top of the list of movies I wanted to watch. As much as I love the Beatles, this movie just didn't seem like it'd be all that special, and there were so many other flicks to catch. No Country for Old Men. There Will Be Blood. Eastern Promises. My girlfriend (and I suspect many other guys' girlfriends), however, felt differently.

So, I watched it. I guess my biggest gripe with the movie is that it doesn't really work towards anything. The story is there, barely. The music is there, at times just to be there for the sake of it. I would think that the two should work together to push the story forward, but sometimes it's almost as if you're watching two different flicks here. Some songs (like Come Together, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite) are placed into the movie in ways that just make you question what the point of having them at all was, other than to just have them there or to create some crazy visual scene to fit them. Some songs may have been twisted in an interesting way, like the "I Want You" part of I Want You (She's So Heavy). But for every one of those, there's a part that seems twisted in a contrived and stupid way, like Let It Be playing on the backdrop of violence, or the "She's So Heavy" part of I Want You (She's So Heavy) with soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty.

Visually, the movie is nice, and that makes for some entertaining scenes (Strawberry Fields Forever comes to mind), but in the end it just reinforces the idea that the songs are too distant from each other. Maybe I don't know how musicals are supposed to work or something, but the movie ends up feeling like a bunch of music videos that are loosely connected to one another. I get this feeling from other musicals, too, but they seem to have a stronger bond between their numbers. Ultimately, Across the Universe feels too much like it is its parts rather than the sum of them.

When it comes to the actual music, surprisingly, I liked more of the covers that really had nothing to do with the story than the ones that did! Come Together and Mr. Kite, though pretty stupid within the context of the movie, were nice enough to listen to. I Want to Hold Your Hand was different. Helter Skelter did grate, however.

In the aftermath, the most surprising thing that happened was that the movie got my girlfriend (who actually ended up not thinking highly of it, either) more interested in listening through my catalog of original Beatles songs than she was before. It's been Beatlemania ever since. I guess if Across the Universe gets more people into the Beatles, I can not care as much about its mediocrity.

I just won't be watching it again.

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