I wanted to like this film. I really did. A musical set only to the Beatles and directed by the queen of visual eye-candy, Julie Taymor (who also directed the sumptuous if flawed Titus)? How could one not root for it out of the starting gate? Alas, a few molehills quickly became mountains for me and led to a general sense of boredom throughout the 131 minute run time.

Firstly, neither the characters nor the story are especially intriguing. Jim Sturgess plays a dock worker named Jude (can you guess what one of the final songs will be?) who travels across the Atlantic to find his long lost father at Princeton. While there he runs into Max (Joe Anderson’s first role), a scruffy slacker more interested in New York than academics, and his beguiling sister Lucy (the ever charming Evan Rachel Wood) who has just lost her one true love to the war in Vietnam. Jude falls for Lucy, Max goes off to war himself, everyone does a lot of protesting, and there you have it. Sturgess and Wood do have genuine chemistry on screen and they managed to eke a sliver of empathy out of me, but the supporting cast (with the exception of a trippy love doctor played by Bono) are undeveloped caricatures and simply serve to flesh out the songs. One girl is named Prudence for (you guessed it) the sole excuse of singing “Dear Prudence” to her.

Which, secondly, brings us to the set pieces. Have musicals ever really been about the story? Don’t we watch Singing in the Rain to see Gene Kelly slide through puddles and Donald O’Connor do that back flip off the wall? For the first 45 minutes of the film I was truly engaged with the set pieces. “Hold Me Tight” is simultaneously sung on two different continents at two very different concerts, “With A Little Help From My Friends” has Jude and Max blitzing through dorm rooms and bars, and “I’ve Just Seen A Face” involves a horde of teens skipping and sliding down bowling alley lanes. Broadway is in full effect where random strangers break into choreographed song at the drop of a pin. Sadly, Taymor shifts the tone halfway through and things become back-breakingly serious. I understand that the Beatles music went from lighthearted to serious over time and that Across the Universe is attempting to mirror that evolution, but I found the heavy politicizing tedious and dreary. Instead of Broadway gaiety we have songs set to anti-war rallies and preachy ‘join the revolution’ speeches. A psychedelic drug trip breaks things up but mainly exists for the editor to go ape wild with the negative color filter.

Lastly, without story or great musical set pieces all you’re left with is the music itself, and the Beatles alone should have been enough to redeem the entire affair. Perhaps to my chagrin, I am not nearly as familiar with their catalogue as I thought I was, and I recognized at most 30% of the songs. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The story was weak, the latter set pieces bored me, and I didn’t recognize the music, effectively killing whatever buzz I managed to get going in the first 45 minutes.

I do not think Across the Universe is a bad film, just that it is a flawed one and that the planets aligned against me while I was watching it. My wife, who grew up listening to the Beatles, adored the film and forgave it the transgressions I was unable to overlook. Die hard Beatles fans will surely find much to love, but casual listeners should pop Singing in the Rain into the DVD tray to get their musical fix instead.