Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Brilliant and touching

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

...you did such a horrible thing. These so called writers just scrolled through The Beatles discography, on drugs, while watching "Hair" and had an idea of making a movie based on these things, but it just went terribly wrong. 1. Everything literally revolves around the songs. "Who minds the plot, the plot is the song and follow it! We are gonna make small meaningful scenes inspired and based on these particular songs, because I like 'em and just mash all the scenes together. While we are at it, I liked that song...what was it called? Pewdence, Paddence, PRUDENCE! Let's add a completely random character and call her Prudence. Hell, make her a lesbian too! I like Sexy Sadie too. Add a girl named Sadie, make her a MILF. One of these better make an appearance through the bathroom window (Get it? Like in the song!) cause I like that song too. Also, main character, gotta name him Jude. So when we get around the end of the movie (when the boy realizes he wants to go after the girl he loves), we can put "Hey Jude" right there. That "You were meant to go out and get her" part gonna hit them hard. Powerful stuff ey?"2. I'm a HUGE Beatles fan. I was raised with all these songs, but this was abysmal. From the musical arrangement to the autotunish, horrible, unhuman-like singing. Only descent singers were Martin Luther and Dana Fuchs. Why make the actors sing if they can't sing, just do a voice-over. Or, if it has to be the actors who do the singing, well, hire ones that can sing damn it! This sounded like hippy High School Musical. If you want a musical anti-war drama, go watch Hair. If you want a movie with songs of The Beatles, just then go watch a Beatles movie.

Jude and Prudence show up to town to allow some more songs from the Beatles to be played. Yes sir, Across the Universe is a musical throwing it back to the 60s for a love story of sorts torn away with war and strife and LSD. If this isn't making too much sense, you're not alone. Despite a couple 5 minute naps, I will attempt to review the film as a whole.I think the movie took the easy route right from the start, and it never recovered from the decision. What I'm talking about is story structure. Obviously, all the songs are already there. So how did they make the movie? They took the songs, and they attempted to branch a story out of them to fill in the gaps. The result is high-quality music videos with small periods of "story" in between."Well, Mr. Smarty Pants, do you have any better ideas?" I do, but it's harder to pull off which is why I said they went easy. There are two types of musicals: Those that have the songs in mind and try creating a story around them (like Across the Universe), and those that have a story already in place that will be propelled forward by the songs. Personally, I feel the latter is almost always the better formula to work with, but even then it's not a perfect system. I'm just saying that it could have been a huge turn-around for this film. I mean, there might be a decent story in there somewhere, but I didn't really find it nor have the patience to put effort into searching for it.As this is a musical, we should definitely talk about the songs. Give credit to the film for trying to give modern updates to the songs with flashy graphics to help, but the characters don't add anything because nobody cares about them through the story. I will say, however, one of my biggest issues is that I think most of the songs are worse versions than the originals. Maybe that's a personal bias, who knows. My prime example is "I Want to Hold Your Hand;" the film version slows it down. That ruins the entire beat, and the lyrics aren't powerful enough to carry the weight of a slower song. The vocals of the majority of characters is great, but not everyone hits the right notes, and vocals alone aren't worth an update of these songs.Despite my inner Scrooge to humbug at these modern folks and their attempts to reminisce on previous times, I still found myself singing along with such classics as "Come Together," "Revolution," and "Hey Jude." I wouldn't even call myself the biggest Beatles fan, but those that claim to hate the band probably just haven't heard the right songs.This 2 hour + movie is not worth it for the few notable songs featured. The story drags on, and it ends up giving you the feeling of "Oh, is this the last song? Nope, here's another scene." And thus it goes on and on. Maybe I should just let it be. I don't know.Not sure where it would have fit in, but not seeing "Yesterday" featured was a big bummer. There are a couple other songs I would have preferred, but I honestly am not sure if this was album-based or what and I don't care enough to research it.Just did a little research, and I'm still unsure of how each song was chosen to appear in the film. Oh well.

Available on Blu-ray Disc (Region B)USA/UK 2007 English (Colour); Musical/Drama/Romance/Fantasy/LGBTQ (Columbia/Revolution/Team Todd); 133 minutes (12 certificate)Crew includes: Julie Taymor (Director); Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais (Screenwriters); Suzanne Todd, Jennifer Todd, Matthew Gross (Producers); Derek Dauchy, Rudd Simmons, Charles Newirth (Executive Producers); Bruno Delbonnel (Cinematographer); Mark Friedberg (Production Designer); Françoise Bonnot (Editor); Elliot Goldenthal (Composer)Cast includes: Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy Carrigan), Jim Sturgess (Jude Feeny), Joe Anderson (Max Carrigan), Dana Fuchs (Sadie), Martin Luther McCoy (Jo-Jo), T.V. Carpio (Prudence); Joe Cocker (Bum, Pimp & Mad Hippie), Bono (Dr Robert), Eddie Izzard (Mr Kite), Salma Hayek (Singing Nurse)Academy Award nomination: Costume Design (Albert Wolsky); Golden Globe nomination: Picture - Musical/Comedy"All you need is love."After jumping ship in the US, a Liverpool dockworker (Sturgess) befriends a college drop-out (Anderson), whose idealistic sister (Wood) he falls for, and is caught up in the anti-Vietnam War fervour, whilst struggling as an artist.A kaleidoscopic, '60s-set jukebox musical written for the big screen (by the English creators of THE LIKELY LADS and PORRIDGE), inspired by over 30 Beatles compositions, the lyrics of which drive the plot forward more than the relatively sparse (spoken) dialogue.Wonderfully dreamlike at times, colourful and dynamic, with well sung, nicely judged performances from the young, fresh leads, and fun musical cameos from Cocker, an American-accented Bono, Izzard, and (multiple) singing nurse Hayek.Blu-ray Extras: Commentary, Featurettes, Deleted/Extended Scenes, Stills Gallery, Behind-the-Scenes Footage. ***½ (7/10)

Phonie acting, emotion, and rape of classic works of art by a legendary band. I watched it once in the theaters when it first came out, and one more time recently. It rarely happens that my conception of a film remains the same or gets worse.In this case, it definitely got worse. I feel that being more interested in art in movies as I've gotten older, really demonstrates how bad this film really is. Before it was simply a dislike of the horrible way the actors were trying to sing the music differently for my younger generation. It was just absolutely disgusting and pathetic. They tried really hard to change it to stay in tune for this younger generation that they warped the music and took away its meaning. I mean, you can't say those Beatles songs mean the same thing in this movie. AT ALL. The songs held meaning for a decade in history, and in this movie, though they tried to add it, it focused on a stupid and phone love story. The acting was so horrible, I think you'd be lying to yourself if you didn't think about rolling your eyes at least a couple times during this film. I'll get back on it a little later. But these are just surface things about the movies. Back to the songs though. JUDE! LUCY? Strawberry fields? You've got to have a stupid sense of imagination if your eyes didn't roll right to the back of your heads. Did people seriously sit there and go... "HOW CLEVER!" Its absolutely pathetic because this film's only support is that of songs from a legendary band. Rewatching it, I definitely disliked the film more for destroying the classical and true meanings of the songs. Perhaps more so because the characters were played pathetically. If you think about it, Jude's story feels forced into the film simply to be clever and play "Hey Jude" and have some (if any) connection to the roots of the music by having a character from Liverpool. His character doesn't really fit in the movie though. He really has no emotion, real drive, reason for thinking the way that he does. If you think about it, every other character has a stronger sense of feeling or doing what they do because they have a stronger back story. Jude is as useless as Prudence if you think about it. Prudence's only reason for being in the film is to add Dear Prudence song. And to prove it, she's gone the rest of the film until the end. You have all these random songs being played because they are good songs, and the film tries to put them by adding a random character or scenario and having these random plot strings that kind of trail off and die. As far as actually filming, the acting is terrible, but I've said that a couple times by now. Why are Jude and Lucy in love? They met at a bowling place, and she shared a simple story with him about her boyfriend dying. Next thing you know she goes all the way to New York and sleeps with him. That'll do it I guess. I'm not sure Jude makes Lucy feel special enough for the connection to transfer to this longing for one another at the end. To be fair, Bane/Mad Max who is pretty much Lucy's boss and secret lover in reality, had a stronger connection with her than Jude. I'm really surprised at the lack of connection. This moves to the camera angles, art, and color added to make scenes look better in the film. The film did use color correctly and even had good concepts of film angling, but it was done totally inappropriately. We can sense a lack of connection with Jude and Lucy really... in my opinion when they get on the bus and find the circus. The reason being because the story is bringing about the decade more in its revolution. Where Jude is having fun, Lucy is living a revolution. I get the love part in the water with the blue and green color, but again, inappropriate, considering the plot has moved on. We continuously see a lack of connection, and all of a sudden we have Jude and the use of love with red in the Strawberry painting. How random, and also convenient to have a Strawberry Fields concept thrown in there. We see how the film has separated the two characters. Lucy is in revolution due to personal losses, but then the film also artificially keeps Jude in his own bubble. The only explanation is he stays in the apartment all day doing mediocre art. There are no real camera angles that depict the true meaning and plot of the film, except when they are all drugged up. Thats all fine and dandy, but all of a sudden Lucy and Jude are to be taken seriously.All in all, bad film. Bad acting, along with a plot that is all over the place due to the fact it is trying to be clever with famous Beatle songs makes it completely pathetic.