Across the Universe

Across the Universe
synopses from IMDB:

A dock worker Jude (Jim Sturgess) travels to America in the 1960s to find his estranged father. There he falls in love with sheltered American teenager Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). When her brother Max (Joe Anderson) is drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, they become involved in peace activism. The film title and main characters are named after various songs by The Beatles.

Musical based on The Beatles songbook and set in the 60s England and America. The love story of Lucy and Jude is intertwined with the anti-war movement and social protests of the 60s. The Beatles' songs are woven into the plot together with visual allusions to films Yellow Submarine (1968) and Let It Be (1970).

An original musical film, Across the Universe is a fictional love story set in the 1960s amid the turbulent years of anti-war protest, the struggle for free speech and civil rights, mind exploration and rock and roll. At once gritty, whimsical and highly theatrical, the story moves from high schools and universities in Massachusetts, Princeton and Ohio to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Detroit riots, Vietnam and the dockyards of Liverpool. A combination of live action and animation, the film is paired with many songs by The Beatles that defined the time.

I really liked this movie. It's weird. Parts of it are a trip. It has a lot going on. And it seems to work, which I like. The story is rather sparse, but the music maintains the coherence and consistency. I really like how the Beatles' songs have been reworked and applied to this story; "Let It Be" as a gospel piece is phenomenal.

The political anti-war message is perhaps a bit strong, but that might be a good thing. I find it interesting that I left the movie actually wanting to know more about Vietnam; I'm left with the impression that we can't understand what's going on in Iraq now if we don't know or understand what happened in Vietnam.

I'm sure there's more to say, but I think I'm still processing the movie and my feelings about it.