Julie Taymor is unquestionably one of the most talented visual directors currently working today and more to the point, she’s proved it with just three films. Naturally, the visual feast that was to be Across the Universe was the perfect outlet for her and to boot it had the built in gimmick, and sure fire best-seller, in using classic Beatles tunes as its soundtrack. And that’s actually about where the list of positive things going for this movie ends; it looks cool and it sounds cooler. The heart and promise of Across the Universe is lost in sentimentality, over-ambition and a complete lack of originality.



Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a dock worker in Liverpool that hopes a ship to America to find his birth father, a former GI that dated his mother during the war. That former GI is now a janitor at Princeton, where Jude not only finds him, but a new friend in Max (Joe Anderson). Max and Jude end up moving to New York with Max’s sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), where they move in with a group of other struggling artists. Jude and Lucy fall in love, but Lucy ends up becoming heavily involved in the Anti-war movement when Max is drafted to fight in Vietnam. Oh, and the whole thing is sung to the music of the Beatles.



The basic problem that it all comes down to, is that the movie is just too busy; too many characters, too many storylines and too many songs and production numbers. If the title of the movie was Cram as Many Beatle Songs as Humanly Possible onto the Soundtrack that’d be one thing, but we’re supposed to be following a narrative here, not personifications of song lyrics and titles. Some characters just sort of disappear and reappear at will or as needed, particularly one character named Prudence (T.V. Carpio) who keeps running away only to turn up somewhere else later on.



Other characters, while present throughout most of the movie just seem to be there without getting any chance to explain themselves or explore their lives and circumstances. Max and Jude’s landlady (Dana Fuchs) is a Janis Joplin-like singer that becomes involved with a black guitarist (Martin Luther) from Detroit. There’s some implied relationship troubles, but we never learn the hows or whys about what their fight was about. We see Luther’s character leave Detroit after a young boy dies in the civil unrest there, but who the boy is and the significance of his death is another little bread crumb that leads us no where.



Presumably, someone thought that the film would be carried away on its whimsy and music and no one would probably worry about things like plot and back story. There was this mini-series a few years ago called The 60s, which was one family’s story during the time period set to the most popular music of the decade. The mini hit all the major highlights: civil rights, racial tensions, Vietnam and bohemian experimentation, which is pretty much everything there is in Across the Universe too. And this makes things rather predictable despite an obviously talented cast and some neat cameos.