Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson
Director: Julie Taymor
Studio: Columbia Pictures/Sony
Video: 2.40:1 anamorphic/enhanced for 16:9 widescreen, 1080p HD
Audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1, Portuguese DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1
Extras: Deleted Scene, Commentary, Featurettes, Stills Gallery, Extended Musical Performances
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Thai, Mandarin Chinese
Length: 133 minutes
Rating: *****
Having had the very good sense to thoroughly indoctrinate my children in the music of the Beatles, I still must admit that I was a bit apprehensive when my twenty-three-year-old daughter insisted last fall that I accompany her to a screening of this Beatle-less mutant of a Beatles movie. I hadn’t even seen the trailer when we arrived at the cinema, and even the promise of tubs and tubs of truly decadent and artery-hardening popcorn didn’t do much to lessen my sense of unease at the concept of this most unholy of creations: a Beatles movie without the Beatles. And even though it featured the music of the Beatles, it wasn’t even performed by the Beatles. I had a hard enough time embracing the concept of Cirque du Soleil’s Love (which, when I finally bought the disc, I loved, by the way). Across The Universe just seemed, well, blasphemous!
All anxieties pushed aside, I loved this movie, and frothed over it for days to family, friends and co-workers. Julie Taymor’s vision for this movie was an incredible wash of Beatlemania and psychedelia, and by all accounts, she fought the studio and financiers to present her vision unaltered. Thank God for strong-willed women! While most of the actors employed here are relative unknowns, that very approach imbued the entire project with a freshness that gave new meaning and relevance to not only the music, but also engendered a great deal of reflection on my many previously cast-in-stone impressions about the Beatles and their music I’ve carried for decades. While the film does contain dialogue, much of the action takes place in the form of musical montages; many critics have complained that there’s a definite lack of character development. While this may indeed carry some weight, for me, the story flowed almost seamlessly, and the heavily psychedelic pastiche of Beatlemania was a powerful visual tour-de-force. The songs were the real characters, and the well-chosen actors helped make the songs real. The cameo appearances were also superb; Joe Cocker just about stole the show with his stirring rendition of Come Together! Had I seen this movie in the seventies (especially if under the influence of certain controlled substances), it would have been undeniably life-changing.
The image quality of this Sony Blu-ray disc is magnificent. A true visual spectacle of this sort demands to be seen in high definition, and the superb treatment it gets here is no disappointment. On my nine-foot screen, it looked almost as good as it did in seventy millimeters at the theater! And the Dolby TrueHD soundtrack is also spectacular; this is undeniably the best-sounding Blu-ray disc to land in my collection, and offers a new reference for both sound and image quality on recorded disc. Ignore the naysayers, get this amazing disc, pop some popcorn and immerse yourself in Julie Taymor’s masterpiece. Very, very highly recommended!
— Tom Gibbs
