Over the last few weeks I got to see both of these musicals in the theaters and was torn on both of them.
The premise of Across the Universe is essentially to turn Beatles songs into a musical. This was a great idea and they did it well, featuring some of the better, and stranger, songs from the Beatles. The problem was that the story itself seemed rather random. I never believed the two main characters were in love, in fact I generally felt that it was a one way love, and that the woman was mostly trying to get over her old fiance who died in the war. The storyline was not very cohesive at all and I think this was largely due to the fact that they were trying to stuff a bunch of songs in that aren’t really related. Still, I liked the movie in a lot of respects. The music was great and well done, it was very artistic in filming, and the acting and singing wasn’t bad either. I would rate the movie as a B- overall.
Sweeney Todd I am torn for different reasons. Unlike Across the Universe, this one was based on a Broadway musical and because of this the story was very cohesive and the songs worked well together. The acting throughout was very good, in particular I thought the boy in the movie was amazing. Was pleasantly surprised at Depp’s averageness at singing, it could have been much worse and I kind of expected it to be! The story line was humorous and I generally enjoyed the movie.
There were two problems however. While I realize that the play itself was rather gorey, I felt that in movie format it was overdone. I can deal with some but there was a sequence of unrealistically bloody murders of like a dozen people, where they could have just shown the actual gore from one or two and got the point across just fine. The second problem is that it drug on fairly long and at times I was seriously bored. The music was very repetitive and I think this could have had something to do with that. I think because I’m not a huge fan of the gore, and a movie should never bore me to such length, I have to give Sweeney Todd a slightly lower C+ for a grade.