Julie Taymor’s long-awaited Beatles-fueled musical seems to have split critics neatly into two camps. There are people like Aaron Dobbs and Anne Thompson, who give Taymor’s spin art 60s pastiche an A for effort, but ultimately concede that the film could, at the very least, stand to have some rainbow-hued fat cut. Then there are the full-on haters, like the journalist I spoke to immediately after yesterday’s press screening, who used the phrase “literally retarded,” and Glenn Kenny, who compares the “mortifyingly soft-headed” experience to “watching Sesame Street.”

They’re all right, and they’re all wrong. The first hour of Across the Universe was nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be; the remaining hour+ was worse. It’s not an experience I would recommend for any obsessive Beatles fan (you’d never be able to stand the fast-food commercial instrumentation), and Taymor’s refusal to deal with the dissolution of the counterculture will infuriate hippie cynics.

But I’m absolutely positive that a shorter cut, stripped of some of the forced multiculturalism and contemporary political references, would play like gangbusters in middle schools.

You and I may be too cool for Taymor’s pie-eyed cocktail of historically slippery psychedelic bliss, but that’s only a problem if you believe that you and I are the film’s target audience. The tween and teen girls fueling the success of High School Musical and Hairspray, who willingly ingest those god-awful Ford music videos on American Idol without understanding the relationship between content and commerce–they’re not going to care that Universe is “too literal”, and they’re definitely not going to shun it for being pretentious. What seem like bad, obvious jokes to jaded grown ups (Psychedelicatessen? A character named Prudence coming through the bathroom window?) are going to play to the pre-16 crowd as clever, maybe even sophisticated nods to whatever knowledge of The Beatles and the 60s they’ve inherited from their parents (and, yes, grandparents). To kids previously unaware of the referents, who are maybe even too young to associate psychedelic imagery with psychedelic drugs, Universe will play like a live-action cartoon. And why shouldn’t it? I think it’s more Mary Poppins than Sesame Street, but either way, it’s going to provide hours of entertainment for the single-digit set.

It helps that Taymor holds back most of her beyond-garish, “high art” extravagance until the third or fourth reel. The first few numbers feel surprisingly organic to their situations, and the performance style, though certainly not natural, shouldn’t scare off any kid who’s ever clamored to see a Disney musical. There’s a lot going on in the film’s first half that will surely appeal to a certain kind of dreamy preteen. A cheerleader sings “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” whilst starring at a n unrequited crush and crossing a football field full of players practicing their tackles; “A Little Help From My Friends” sets the stage for a montage of beery carousing with new pals. The kid who slinks through the halls of high school with headphones on imagining life playing out in front of her as a movie, is going to eat this shit up.

As it is, there’s probably decent midnight screening potential in West Hollywood and the Castro, and maybe even a fair shot at certain international markets–I’m assuming there’s still an audience somewhere in the universe that’s wiling to slurp revisionist American nostalgia as fast as our studio-backed auteurs can export it. I don’t think they ever had a chance with middle-aged male film critics, but if Taymor could just be a little bit less stubborn about the material, she wouldn’t need them. I have no doubt that if this movie was cut down to 100 minutes, Sony would have the movie of the year (in fact, of many years) for 13 year old girls. I’m almost angry to think about that opportunity going to waste.