Really not my favourite poster, 'All you need is love' plastered at the top with the couple pictured in the foreground really doesnt hit at the core of the film, which is so much more than a Beatles-inspired love story. It's quite obvious that Julie Taymor was trying to hit at something that, while socially conscious, did not try to forcefeed a message or a stand, or even to surface underlying societal problems. It seems to me that at its heart, 'Across the Universe' simply attempts to live and breathe the sixties, and without engagement with the issues of the day the film simply wouldn't get off the ground.
I appreciate very much all the creative work that went into the film, that really credits it as a film musical, which is a difficult type of film to make work, I think. This is one of the best I've seen so far. More human than Phantom of the Opera, more genuine than Rent, and more ambitious than Once (which I still like a lot). I especially liked the Across The Universe/Helter Skelter scene, and the Strawberry Fields Forever scene is simply one of the best. Mindblowing.
And the film is more than arty interpretations of Beatles songs. The Let It Be scene, which was framed by two separate funeral scenes, one emerging from the Detroit riots and the other from the Vietnam war, seamlessly united by the common themes of loss and specifically death, and on an audio-sensory level by the classic Beatles song. I know it kinda sucks to technicalise this, but it's difficult to say in any other words how this scene moved me. It's super genuine. I think that would do.
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