By: Mandy
Posted: November 21, 2023
Originally Written: November 3, 2023
Image courtesy of TheMovieDB
Hey, 14-year-old me.
You’re going to go through a phase for a few years where you’ll be embarrassed to have ever loved this movie. Really, you’re more mad at yourself for having a Beatles phase in the first place, but you shouldn’t be.
Across The Universe came out at an absolutely incredible time for you, affecting you in ways you don’t even realize just yet. You were SUPER impressionable, and this movie, along with the friend you talk about horror movies with, can be credited for your budding interest in movies. Specifically, Across The Universe gets you to love really weird artistic films. There’s also that queer subplot in the movie with Prudence that makes you feel…peculiar? For reasons you can’t explain? There’s a reason for that, but I’ll let you figure that out later.
More importantly, I want you to know about the movie from the perspective of 30-year-old you. You – yes, you, the 14-year-old me – were right about this film all along. There’s a reason that some of the compositions in this film are more iconic to you than the Beatles originals, and we both know that not all of them hit, but wow, the sequences that do are still great. All My Loving, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, I Want You, Dear Prudence, Come Together…and that’s just in the first half. The choreography and colors are still goddamn gorgeous in 2023, let alone in 2007. No wonder the movie won your heart.
People who saw the movie know this, but let me tell you what stuff Adult Me noticed. The way this movie ties together so many characters and storylines is impressive. I have to imagine Julie Taymor was inspired by Rent and that musical’s large cast and strong sense of camaraderie among the characters. While that musical’s storytelling suffers, however, Across The Universe brings all the disparate parts together very nicely. The film is about a collective sense of suffering during the 60s, but also the freedom and prosperity that came with the era, soundtracked by the band that arguably shaped it harder than any other music act of the time.
Not all of the plot is great, and that’s something both you, 14-year-old me, and me, 30-year-old me, is in agreement with. I certainly like the last thirty minutes a lot more than you did, and for more reasons than those absolutely wonderful Happiness is a Warm Gun and Hey Jude sequences. There are several sequences that don’t really have a clear point being in the movie, which I can forgive, but the biggest issue is that it feels like it resolves most of its arcs offscreen. Lucy feels like she gets the most complete arc from a writing perspective, and I guess Jude’s story in the final part of the movie is about picking himself up and getting back to where he needed to be after getting sent back to square one, but something about it always felt…off? Maybe it’s because it felt like a lazy way to have a timeskip.
But to cut a long story short, 14-year-old me, I still…really love this movie. Maybe part of it is the nostalgia talking, but I got to show it to my girlfriend today and she immediately got why we loved this movie, and if I needed any more reassurance that I’m okay to feel this way, it was that. We’ve long since seen hundreds of movies, including some of the most acclaimed films of all time, but this one is still an 8/10.
Sincerely,
The Me of 2023.