Across the Universe

"Across the Universe" is a film about the politics and social issues of the sixties. It was not actually written in the sixties, but came out in 2007 as popular culture began seeing a new wave of hippie culture and fascination with the sixties. The movie is about a group of friends who might be considered hippies, who make friendships, fall in love, and rise up against what they see as the oppressive forces in their society. The movie is written as a musical using remakes of 34 old Beatles songs. The plot is worked around the themes in the song, so that the characters are able to sing the Beatles songs in every scene, and the plot still makes sense. At a lot of points in the movie I still felt as though the plot was really stretched to fit with the songs, but in general they did a pretty good job of incorporating the music into the story line. The cinematography of the film is very dreamlike and seems to be nodding back to the heavy LSD usage of the sixties. During many of the musical scores, the characters become part of a magical dance number with mythical creatures and dramatized war scenes. During one of these dreamlike scenes, the movie make another nod back to the Beatles by including a lot of the elements of the "Yellow Submarine" film around the "Across the Universe" characters. Although the scene is still centered around the "real" actors, there are cartoons all around them that the viewer would recognize from "Yellow Submarine." In general, "Across the Universe" was made to bring some of the music and social values of the sixties back into modern popular culture.