To make a movie that is a remake, based on a popular book, or based on a well-known story is to run an uphill battle. Why? Because whenever the story behind the movie is already common knowledge, we all already have our own very specific ideas of exactly what that story looks like, who is behind it, and how it goes. And when it comes to making movies representing a well-known music collection, I’m afraid the same is often true.

Take, for example, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe. It is not a music video for a song that just came out. It is a video for an entire collection of songs that have been playing on airwaves and circulating through the popular consciousness for over forty years. They meant something to the four men who made them. They meant something similar yet slightly different to every person who heard them when they first came out. And they have meant something else to all of us who have listened to them since then.

Thus occurs the problem with making a music-video-style movie of The Beatles’ music. Unlike recent biopic musicals that wowed audiences and critics alike (Dreamgirls, Walk the Line, Ray), Across the Universe does not seek to tell the tale of the people behind the songs we know so well, the true stories of the song’s births, and the very specific situations from which they were birthed. Instead, like so many music videos, Across the Universe seeks to almost capture the emotional meaning behind the words and bring them to life in some surreal mix of symbolism and reality.

It is a technique that often works. I have seen many a music video that has come very close to capturing the feeling that a song awakens in me. But, the problem with Across the Universe is that its story stays too close to reality to also step so far into the bounds of imagination. It seeks to portray what The Beatles’ songs meant to a mix people living during the times in which they were created. But only one step away from the place where the songs came to life, two steps outside of reality, and too many steps inside a world of bizarre and contrived creative expression, the story just comes off as almost too Taymoresquely unique for anyone to sit back, accept, and enjoy its reality when each of us already has visions of what that reality should be inside our own heads.

Not everyone may agree with me, but as I see it, Bono just can’t be a California hippie when you know he’s always been a well-dressed European. Evan Rachel Wood might be the image of innocent suburban femininity, but somehow even the cutest cardigan twin-set can’t erase the knowledge that she was a terror of a thirteen-year-old and is currently Marilyn Manson’s girlfriend. I’d prefer to imagine strawberry fields as an escape to a place of happiness and freedom, not a terror filled trip through exploding fruit, landmines, violent protests, and blood soaked war zones. And when someone says they want me, I would much rather keep on thinking of it of an expression of love than a violent demand to join the army.

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