Skip These Beats

I recently had the chance to see Across the Universe, last year's film incorporating songs by The Beatles into a musical drama.

In the plus column was the sound and spectacle of the film. It looked fantastic, with virtually every frame of the movie drenched in color and eye-catching imagery. The orchestrations of the songs were also very good, capturing all different sorts of moods and at times presenting very different arrangements of the classic songs.

But in the negative column was virtually everything else. The film was virtually incoherent. The creators began with the notion of weaving something around The Beatles' songs, but they really ended up smashing together puzzle pieces that didn't fit. There were too many characters, too many uninteresting sidetracks... and that's on the rare occasions that things actually took a narrative shape for longer than the space of a rock music video. Subplots would appear out of the blue without preamble and vanish just as suddenly.

The stakes were neither convincing nor compelling. The main story between the two lovers offered no credible obstacles standing in their way. A subplot involving a young man being sent off to war presented no real consequences for him in his time there or in returning home. And so on through ever less interesting smaller storylines.

Even many of the "music video"-like vignettes within the film are unenjoyable, in that they're unoriginal. You may recall that a while back, I saw the Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show, Love, also based on the music of the Beatles. That piece of theater uses a great many of the same songs, and oftentimes in very, very similar ways. With such a large catalogue of music to work with, it's hard to excuse such derivative ideas.

Perhaps a real fan of The Beatles (which I confess, I'm not especially) would find more to like in this movie. I just saw a feast for the eyes and ears that was utterly empty calories for the brain. I rate it a D+.