Warning to anyone with sentiment for the Beatles music: this movie metaphorically defecates on the Lennon memorial. I felt like an Orthodox Catholic watching Jesus Christ Superstar. What'll Taymor do next? Heart Shaped Box: the musical of Kurt Cobain.

Aside from the fact that this movie isn't totally broken, it's totally insulting. I love the Beatles, but Taymor makes them her bitch and uses songs that were once important as nothing more than mouthpeices for her characters. Terrible, heart ripping movie that will kill any real Beatles fan that understands that their music is for the fans, not for a hack filmmaker.

Abortive is the key word here. The movie introduces a bunch of archetypal characters, which are quickly ushered out after some awkward attempts at relevance. After a bit, we're left with the two main characters and a boring, unconvincing, love story that's strictly by-the-numbers. Even the music, surprisingly, is mediocre.

heres a film that you hate yourself for not liking.... Taymor brilliance is lost and reserved for elaborate montages and eccentric scenery that just does not counterbalance a weak story ... lost in translation... musical numbers don't arise with grace they seem forced and heavily drawn out and dependent on its flare .. characters have no soul and aside form prudence no one else takes center stage... total disappointment... FRIDA !!! remember that was beautiful… Expand

Across the Universe is definitely an ambitious movie full of ideas however many of the ideas lack a real sense of place and purpose. Pieces seemed to have been thrown in here and there if only to get us more Beatles songs, which were, by the way, butchered beyond credibility. This is a direct result of the difficult concept attempted and lack of solid direction. The movie ended up being extremely cliche and incoherent.… Expand

Back Broadway's brighter days, a musical that never took flight was known as a "turkey." Throw in some stuffing and some gravy and "Across the Universe" would feed a family of ten at Thanksgiving. Pretentious and plodding and, ultimately, just a waste of time, money and talent. Handsome performers with pretty little pop voices are everywhere but there's naught but the thinnest little story on which songs and fragments-of-songs hang. What's supposed to be "cool" and "stylized" has all been done before (see Milos Forman's "Hair" and Ken Russell's "Tommy").… Expand

The Beatles are the most over rated rock band in the world. Their music is terrible and makes an excellent match for this craptacular film.

WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT.... I will admit that the directing and the message was great, but you can't have a good movie without a great script. The story is so cliche, we've seen it all before. I wish they could of said something new besides war is bad, artists are selfish egomaniacs, and all we need is love. This movie had a great opportunity to say something, but instead it preached to the choir. I'm their key audience, super liberal artist and I left two hours in. BECAUSE YOU STOP CARING ABOUT THE CHARACTERS BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS ANYTHING BUT TO BE SAD! Should of used some of that money they spent on production design to get a good screenwriter. DON'T SEE IT.… Expand

Julie Taymor woke up one day and thought to herself: "Why don't I take a load of beatles songs and turn it into a crappy high-school musical-like Disney movie"? And here it is: terribly acted, poorly written and with the worst singing voices that movie fans heard in the past 10 years. the reason i'm not giving it a zero is the bad teeth joke. that was funny, but almost nobody noticed.

If you're in the mood to sit through two hours of non-stop singing, then this is the right movie for you. Song, after song, after song, every musical number in this film seems to be have crammed in. This is one of those movies in which you can only see once. Although some covers of the Beatles songs are quite enjoyable, most of the over-thirty songs in this film are cut short.

Imagine the post-teen stars of the WB singing the Beatles! Sound good to you? Then you'll love this movie. There's maybe 10 minutes of good sequences, though, which saves it from a 0. Bono lends the film some much-needed weird energy. And it is interesting to hear Beatles songs re-set; they deserve to be, because they hold up so well. But it is horrible to see them re-set to a trite, thin story which somehow manages to thoroughly trivialize the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the creative magic of the Beatles' music. It is as if the worst of the Baby Boomer cliches have been given hipper haircuts in an extended iPod commercial. This movie is godawful, but not even "interesting-bad." Just bad.… Expand

Turned it off after the little Asian lesbo started singing about the blonde cheerleader. Absolute trash. Anyone who can recall listening to the Beatles when they were kids on LP should avoid this film like the plague. This is what HSM would be without a Disney sponsor.

This movie makes a mockery of the Beatles and their music. The fact that every character is named after a Beatles' song is bad enough. But to use the Beatles' music to drive this insipid plot is criminal. There are some creative visual images in the film and the young actors do a fairly good job singing. But this is a bad movie. I love the Beatles. I remember when they did not allow their music to be used for any commercials, etc. It was hard for me to sit through their songs being made into plot points. This movie is not an homage to the Beatles -- it is an abomination to their legacy.… Expand

This movie was the biggest waste of money ever. The writer must have been high on something more than caffeine. The movie was so random it was scary. I have now found my worst movie of all time.

Whoever categorized this movie as a musical probably never saw a musical. In the entire movie, there is probably 20 minutes worth seeing. Besides "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Come Together" all songs felt clumsily tacked on. After the first 50 minutes, the characters meander around pointlessly. The story twists and contorts itself for the inclusion of a few more poorly done songs.

Contrived, shallow, and the worst cinematic use of good music ever... someones definitely dropping acid if this is their impression of the 60's.

I kept thinking this would get better. It didn't. I went because I'm a big fan of Julie Taymor. Someone should have held her genius feet to the fire on this one, though. This is embarrassing..to watch, to listen to, to think money had been spent to make this enlarged Coke commercial.

The sensation after watching this movie is akin to being run over by a bus and then it backed up and ran over you again. This movies utterly predictable and quite frankly at time a bit irritable. If there ever was a case of a musical having too many songs, it was this one. By 3rd song, one is praying that the power just cuts out. If there is one star in this movie its Jim Sturgess who plays Jude. Managing to somewhat carry the viewer along with him, he's possibly the only good thing to come out of this movie Overall, this movie represents a bad acid trip.… Expand

What a horrid movie. Its like a nonstop interwoven Christian rock video. I could see if you were 50 something and really out of touch and were a hippy for one summer before you went to college and got a job that just maybe you might get sentimental and actually fall for this dreck but come on! Theres not even any Beatles songs in it!!! Yes there are people singing Beatles songs... but they nor this film doesn't even come close to a smidgen of creative force that was and is the Beatles. The only good scene was Eddie Izzard doing Tim Leary, that was good! Bloated Bono doing Kesey and the Merry Pranksters... wow that was embarrassing. Horrible movie.… Expand

Everything was so forced and put on, the film was nearly impossible to watch. Oh, and the music...well, if you like good music then this film is not for you. If you like very sappy, ridiculous, embarrassingly awful renditions of some of the best songs ever written, then this film is for you. I don't like to be so harsh, but this movie did nothing but piss me off. Every time they seemed like they were going to do something worth watching, somebody would start singing and would bury my head and pray for it to be over. Avoid at all costs.… Expand

Wow the 60s! It's exactly as everyone said it was. I mean exactly: Vietnam, protest, drugs, sex. But watered down from Hair, the musical it copies. There is nothing original or thought provoking here at all. Just a bunch of tired cliches. Poor Beatles songs!

Really bad Beatles karaoke movie with possibly the flimsiest plot and characters i have ever seen.

This looks like, and has about as much depth as, a (bad) film-school music-video. It lacks depth and heart, and tries so hard to fit Beatles lyrics in as dialogue that everything comes across as stilted and painful. Bono's cameo is almost unbearably dreadful. The three rating is given only because hey, it's the Beatles, and it does have its (very occasional) moments of being actually quite visuall arresting, and Jim Sturgess is, quite surprisingly, a pleasure to watch. Otherwise, to be avoided/to be run away from.… Expand

If you grew up with the Beatles in the 60's and understood the times as one who actually lived in it, you may find this movie utter drival. I'm sorry, but whoever wrote this movie doesn't have a clue. Yes, some nice visuals, but just too hokey and out of date.

Astonishingly misconceived. The arrangements are awful, the plot is non-existent, the actors are asleep and the vision of the sixties seems to be derived from - to rob a Simpsons gag - Bob Hope parodies of that decade. I am ASTONISHED the critics have been so tolerant.

Just got back from seeing this, with a totally open mind. What a horrible, insufferable film, what a cheesy embarrassment. Definitely in the Top Ten of the Worst Movies I've Ever Seen. And I love musicals.

Its such a travesty trying to cram 33 of the Beatles

It's easy to tell that the only purpose of the "movie" is to play as many songs as possible. The storyline played out like... well, a terrible movie. I give it a 2 because the Beatles have some good songs, although some are butchered in this 2 hour music video.

Really plastic.

I will review only the first 20 minutes, as this is all I could bear before I slunk down my seat and crawled out of the movie theater in sheer embarrassment. It is a musical, and an awful one at that. Wielding it's cutesy cleaver, and butchering Beatles classics as it went. The dialogue and characterisation was wooden, and the portrayal of the 60's drew on the most simplistic cliches. Why don't you just take the entire back catalogue of the World's greatest band, and let the preliminary contestants of Amercian Idol massacre insteadl? At least this kind of sacrilege will by vaguely funny.… Expand

A thoroughly appalling, wasteful mess. The movie consists of a series of poorly executed, horribly arranged music videos connected by a shoe string plot and a cast of caricatures. One of the biggest movie disappointments I could ever imagine seeing.

At times it is a visual masterpiece, but other times it is a sprawling mess of jumbled story arcs. The actual music is very well integrated in the movie, but that doesn't mean I would listen to any of the covers over the original Beatles version. All in all, this movie just seems unnecessary in this day and age of cinema - the 1960s were an interesting time, but this movie just flies through all of the controversial aspects without any real effort to look at why they were going on; it fills that hole with teen angst and a rather weak and predictably bland storyline.… Expand

The film ultimately comes across as one mega-gimmick. This is a musical that does not use the soundtrack to enhance the plot and character development like most musicals. Rather the plot is used as a clumsy device to shoot from one song or reference to the other, often inexplicably. For instance, the female lead is named Lucy, solely for the purpose of playing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" which ends up seeming nonsensical in the greater context of the film; the pinnacle of this is the director's interpretation of "Dear Prudence," which features the group singing the lyrics "Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play?" to a secondary character named none other than... Prudence who has locked herself in a closet in a fit of teen angst. It could be argued that the scene contains a deeper meaning in that Prudence is revealed to be a lesbian (not coincidentally in a scene that makes no sense in the larger scope of the narrative) and that this is the group urging her to "be herself," this however is ultimately lost in the almost comical absurdity of the scene. Situations such as this present themselves often in ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, and I couldn't help but feel that during every single musical selection or reference to THE BEATLES or their work that the movie itself was nudging me with its elbow, constantly asking if I got what it did there. The end result is a musical that is hindered by its use of soundtrack as opposed to being aided by it and thinks far too highly of itself in the process.

Pros: There's some pretty things to look at.
Cons: Plot? who needs plot when you have a soundtrack.… Expand

Pretentious, self-indulgent, and pseudo-artsy. The story is boring and superficial, peppered with far too many attempts at "powerful" psychedelic imagery. The music is the only good thing about it.