Sometimes the signs of a troubled production are right up there on the screen for you to see. Across the Universe has received a lot of press the past couple months, due to a behind the scenes struggle between director Julie Taymor (best known for adapting Disney's The Lion King for the Broadway stage) and the studio for final control of the film. I'm not entirely sure whose vision won out in the end, but the movie often plays like a poorly edited, incoherent mix of ideas. There are some stunning visuals to be seen here, but for all of their splendor, they do not resonate with us. That's because the characters and story at the center of it all are bargain basement cliches. This is a movie I desperately wanted to love or even like, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. This movie is a mess, but an interesting one to watch from time to time.

Billed as a musical look at America in the 1960s mainly set to the tunes of The Beatles, the story centers on a young man from Liverpool named Jude (Jim Sturgess). Jude has lived alone with his mother all his life, never knowing who his father was. So, he sets sail for America and tracks his dad (Robert Clohessy) down, where he finds the man working as a maintenance man at a college campus. While exploring the campus, Jude befriends a wild young radical man named Max (Joe Anderson), who seems more interested in causing trouble than getting an education. When Max takes Jude to his home for Thanksgiving, he meets up with Max's pretty younger sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), who instantly connects with Jude, even though she has a boyfriend who is currently fighting over in Vietnam. After Max has a blowout with his family over where he's headed in life, he takes Jude and runs off to New York, where they move in with a singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and her friends. Lucy eventually moves in as well, after her boyfriend is killed in the war. As Jude and Lucy begin to get closer, the world around them starts to change, with protests, violence, and demonstrations against the war filling ever aspect of their lives. As the effort against the war increases, the two lovers find themselves slowly drifting apart and going their separate ways in life.

Across the Universe is not the first musical film to be set to the classic songs of The Beatles. (Anyone remember 1978's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, where the Bee Gees and a host of celebrities mutilated their music?) It's a clever idea and you can see how it would work, but Taymor keeps on dropping the ball. She keeps on setting up one Beatles reference after another. Everything from characters named after their songs, to little references in the dialogue or in the film itself. The movie starts to resemble one big in-joke for Beatles fans at times, and it gets rather tiresome. The movie doesn't care about its own plot or its characters, it just wants to be a musical revue, and bridge the gaps with a cliched storyline and moldy dialogue. The screenplay Dick Clement and Ian La Frenaise (Flushed Away) is haphazard and often quite sloppy. Characters show up then disappear for long stretches of time, plot points are completely forgotten about (as soon as Jude meets his father, he never seems to bring it up or even care about his dad ever again), and the entire script is episodic and feels like a series of expected stops rather than a thought-out screenplay. It's as if the two had a check list of 60s cliches to include in the movie (Vietnam war, experiment with drugs, radical protests, important events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King), and then built their screenplay around it, checking off each item as they went along. The story has no flow, and just kind of jumps from one point to the next.

Because of the sloppy screenplay, we never get to know or feel for the characters as much as we could or should. Jude and Lucy often come across as the blandest of lovers, with very little personality between them. Their attraction to each other seems physical, and not much more than that. This obviously makes it hard to get behind them, or want to see them together by the time the end credits start to roll. The entire cast is treated with this same level of indifference. We could care less about them, and quite frankly, neither could the movie since it keeps on dropping them for such long periods of time, I actually forgot about one or two of them until they showed up again. A good example is a young woman named Prudence (T.V. Carpio), who starts out promisingly enough as a woman who wants to embrace her homosexuality, but can never admit her feelings to the woman she longs for. However, this is all we ever learn about her. Her introduction scene, where she sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to herself as she watches a high school cheerleader she longs for, sets up the character for an interesting and potentially painful story arc, but we never get it. She's just reduced to popping up in musical numbers now and then for the rest of the film. Given the well-publicized fight for final control of the film, it makes me wonder if some of her scenes got cut.

When it comes to musicals, I can often overlook all that if the songs are inserted in a way that they flow into the story, or if the musical sequences are energetic and lively. Unfortunately, aside from a few stand out moments, Across the Universe fails here as well. A lot of the songs seem to be shoehorned in, or sometimes cut so short that we wonder why the filmmakers bothered to include the song in the first place. Songs like "All My Loving" and "Blackbird" come and go in a blink of an eye, while others such as "If I Fell" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" slow the action down to a crawl and had me fidgeting in my seat. There is a large inconsistency in the musical sequences. Some of them are lively and fun, such as a wild party montage between Jude and Max set to "With a Little Help From My Friends", while others such as "Strawberry Fields Forever" just seem like a mistake that make you wonder what Taymor was thinking in the first place. It's mainly when the film truly lets go and uses wild imagery and high energy that Across the Universe truly comes to life. There are two sequences which practically come one after another set to "I Am the Walrus" and "The Benefit of Mr. Kite" that freely combine special effects and animation that are quite literally a wonder to behold. Another highlight comes during Max's induction to the US Armed Forces, set to "I Want You", where the iconic Uncle Sam poster comes to animated life and leads Max on a nightmarish trip populated with bizarre army soldiers with dead eyes. It's these moments that you see what the movie wants to be, which makes it all the more painful when mediocrity slips back in almost as soon as the scene is over.
I certainly cannot accuse Across the Universe of not being ambitious. The movie is often quite entertaining to look at, but the performances and the story are not there. The songs are inconsistent in quality, the characters are paper thin, and the entire end product comes across as uncertain. You can tell there was a conflict in interest in the making of this movie due to the fact that it never quite seems to be sure what it wants to be. When the final scene has finished playing out, we find ourselves remembering bits and pieces of the movie, but nothing really about the movie itself. Across the Universe is an ambitious, but ultimately emotionless, trip that should have been a lot more fun than it is.

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