Across the Universe Review: Score: 3.4 out of 10

Director Julie Taymor has travelled across the universe to bring us back a film from the second dimension: it looks out of this world, but in reality, its actually quite flat. To call Across the Universe, a movie is a stretch, as it only has about half an hour's worth of plot, featuring shallow and contrived characters in a cliche situation, interspersed with loosely connected music videos of poorly covered Beatles songs. As there is so little actual plot, the film relies on the songs to move it along, the problem being that, as the songs were not created for the characters, they seem impersonal and fail to move the character development along, and instead driving the narrative into strange territory that serves no purpose but to lead up to... more poorly executed Beatles songs! Hooray. Adding to the stupidity of the concept are characters named after people in Beatles songs, whose only purpose are to show up as subjects for more Beatles songs. The entire film revolves around these songs, with nothing else to hold them up, and in the end, they can't hold a candle to the originals.