Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Melanie Fischer | Film | September 23, 2025
The first time I saw the trailer for A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey I kept waiting for a punchline that never came, or perhaps Rod Serling’s voice to cut in and explain that we’ve crossed over into the Twilight Zone. Nothing about it sounded like a real movie — the title, the premise, the fact that somehow Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell deemed it worth their time, that Kogonada (After Yang, Columbus) was directing it. Seth Reiss (The Menu) writing it was the only element that made much sense at all. He seems like a “big ideas” kind of guy who’s probably excellent in a room, but in terms of actual execution of those ideas, especially with regards to character, I’ve yet to see evidence of much skill.
While trying to keep an open mind, I went into A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey anticipating a Hallmark movie with delusions of grandeur — pretty people on a contrived, low-stakes paint-by-numbers journey that ends with everything tied up with a neat little bow.
The reality is so, so, much worse. Describing the premise here as contrived would be like calling Mt. Everest a steep hill.
Once upon a time in the 1990s there was a film called A Life Less Ordinary. It’s one of the worst things Danny Boyle has ever done, but a fascinating cultural artifact nonetheless, starring Cameron Diaz and Ewan McGregor sporting truly atrocious haircuts presumably from the same unisex barber. It’s a bonkers movie about a bratty heiress and a luckless loser and a pair of hapless guardian angels assigned to matchmake them.
Where A Life Less Ordinary is weird in a way that feels undeniably human in its specificity, A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is algorithmic thinking gone astray. You can only understand the existence of a movie like this as the product of a flawed algorithm left on autopilot — it ticked the right boxes with the right buzzwords at the right time so it got made, even though it’s blatantly a non-starter in a way that becomes really obvious once you start asking some big questions like, “who is this movie even for?”
Instead of angels, the couple in A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is being set up by the inanely nebulous “Car Rental Agency,” which is some mystical matchmaking something-or-rather that never makes any sense whatsoever. (Who are they? What are their motives? Why do they care? Is this supposed to be an alternate reality where magical interludes are commonplace? Nobody in this movie actually reacts to any of the fantastical things that happen so it’s impossible to tell.)
It’s rare to see a movie in the fantasy space that seems as pointedly uninterested in doing any kind of worldbuilding as this one. It goes to such efforts to make the setting everywhere-but-nowhere (they live in “The City”) that much of the dialogue sounds like it’s between spies who have forgotten their cover stories; it renders normal conversation impossible.
David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) don’t feel like individuals so much as allegorical placeholders. The film doesn’t even bother to mention how they both know the (nameless, utterly bland) couple whose wedding they meet at. David has a bad case of “former gifted kid” and never got over being publicly rejected by his high school crush, Sarah is a dismissive-avoidant serial cheater with daddy issues and a dead mom; this script is so obviously written by a guy it’s almost funny.
There’s a lack of specificity that poisons the whole film, a generic quality that is all the worse for being so clearly an intentional choice on the part of the filmmakers. It’s a gross misunderstanding of what actually works in a movie, and particularly stunning to see coming from Kogonada. His debut feature Columbus was one of the best, most absorbing “nothing happens” movies of the past decade — a story of a fleeting but profound unlikely connection between two strangers both grappling with major life choices. And it works singularly well because of its incredible specificity of place and the great nuance of the two main characters.
What happened?
It’s painful to see a filmmaker devolve from such mastery to making a film that utterly disregards the very same principles to its own detriment. It’s still pretty in the sense that Kogonada knows how to compose an attractive image, but that intentionality of using style to add depth and greater meaning is utterly gone. A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey feels untethered from any kind of emotional truth or reality. It is a simulacrum molded in the vague shape of “romance,” but it’s just a glossy, plastic surface that’s completely hollow on the inside. An AI chatbot would probably describe it as whimsical, because that’s what it’s clearly trying to be, but it does not seem like any human being who has actually felt emotions was consulted on the matter.
There always have been, and there always will be, a lot of bad movies in the world. But A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is the most heinous kind of bad — it’s not gone astray because of some wrong turns along the way, the vision is misguided on a fundamental level. Much like the characters of David and Sarah, the film itself is self-sabotaging, constantly undermining its own goals — and there’s no divine intervention in the form of a GPS to get it back on track.
A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is now playing in theaters.
