A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (dir. Kogonada)
Certificate: 15
Running Time: 109 mins
UK Distributor: Sony Pictures
UK Release Date: 19 September 2025
WHO’S IN A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY?
Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon, Brandon Perea, Chloe East, Hamish Linklater, Lucy Thomas, Yuvi Hecht, Calahan Skogman, Jacqueline Novak, Jennifer Grant, Shelby Simmons
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Kogonada (director), Seth Reiss (writer, producer), Dan Friedkin, Ryan Friedkin, Youree Henley and Bradley Thomas (producers), Joe Hisaishi (composer), Benjamin Loeb (cinematographer), Susan E. Kim (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Two strangers (Robbie and Farrell) embark on a fantastical adventure together…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY?
We absolutely need to champion original high-concept movies wherever we can, with the recent critical and commercial success of films like Sinners, Weapons and Materialists all being shining examples in a climate filled with sequels, spin-offs and adaptations of everything under the sun. However, when it comes to A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, a film that practically screams originality from every corner of its being, it is equally important to point out that just because something is original doesn’t automatically mean it’s any good.
Such is the case, rather sadly, with this would-be fantastical romantic epic from screenwriter Seth Reiss (a co-writer on The Menu) and director Kogonada (previously of Columbus and After Yang), which unfortunately suffers from the simple fact that these are perhaps the two least compatible talents for this particular concept, and you can feel their wildly different approaches clashing at all times in a film that never feels sure of itself.
The film is about David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie), two strangers who happen to hire a couple of cars from a mysterious warehouse facility simply called The Car Rental Agency, run by Kevin Kline and a strangely German-accented Phoebe Waller-Bridge who insist he bring along a GPS that looks like if HAL 3000 was built with the technology from the original Star Wars trilogy. After briefly exchanging conversations at the wedding they’re both headed to, they end up crossing paths once more on the way home when David’s GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) asks him if he wants to go on, well, a big bold beautiful journey, which leads to him picking Sarah up from her conveniently broken-down car – right after the film stops for a solid minute to become a Burger King commercial, because a movie like this seriously needed product placement – and heading to a series of mysterious doors that each lead to different memories from their pasts. There, the two retread various moments of heartbreak from their childhood and their more recent failed relationships, while occasionally partaking in musical numbers and emotional reunions with long-lost parents, and somewhere along the way realising that they may in fact be perfect for each other.
What follows is a truly odd journey that’s neither big nor bold (though thanks to Benjamin Loeb’s colourful cinematography, it certainly is beautiful), as Kogonada and Reiss struggle to align their differing approaches to the material. Reiss, in particular, has written a paper-thin story where things just randomly happen without rhyme or reason, like they’ll be wandering and chatting through their old high school corridors or hospital wards before suddenly continuing the same conversations in near-empty museum spaces, as though they’re performing in an abstract GCSE stage drama. Nobody ever questions any of it either, accepting such strange things entirely at face value without wanting to know exactly what’s going on or how it’s even happening. This ties in to how bad the dialogue is, as no character in this movie ever talks like an actual human being as they deliver numerous contrived and extremely tedious monologues that think they’re far more profound than they actually are, to a point where even M. Night Shyamalan would roll his eyes at how on-the-nose this writing is.
Such things could work just fine in a surreal fantasy film like the one A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is trying to be, where things don’t have to feel as though they’re of this reality, or even make that much sense. But since there’s never a point where it seems like there’s any rationale behind these out-there developments, or even an attachment to these characters whose lives turn out to really not be that interesting, it all just feels random for the sake of being random instead of saying anything meaningful.
Conversely, Kogonada fails to match the outlandish material with direction that compliments this kind of storytelling, with the director opting for a sombre and humanist tone like his previous films, which doesn’t go well with the intended larger-than-life whimsy of Reiss’s script and makes it all feel weirdly stilted and monotonous. This also proves to be a problem for both Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, both excellent actors in their own right who here are unable to generate any believable chemistry between them, since they’re directed in such a way where their conversations feel overly rehearsed and abnormal, to where you really don’t know why they’re ending up together other than because the script says that they have to. Again, though, very few actors of their calibre could make any of the dialogue in this script sound natural, but Kogonada isn’t even able to make it work on his own terms, as he too is guilty of applying the wrong level of energy for something that should elicit more emotion than it does.
For all its flaws, and there are quite a few, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey still earns a couple of points for at least trying to be ambitious with its originality. Few movies of this nature rarely get made anymore, let along with studio backing and top talent in front of and behind the camera, so it’s cool that it got made and was allowed to express its imagination in the way that it does.
However, that doesn’t mean it works an actual film, especially when it has two competing visions getting in the way of one another and turning something that should have been easy to comprehend into an incoherent and over-indulgent mess which can’t make heads or tails of itself.
SO, TO SUM UP…
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is an ambitiously original but ultimately disappointing mess that fumbles its fantastical concept with an inconsistent vision, whether it be from Seth Reiss’s nonsensical script laced with terrible dialogue, or from Kogonada’s mismatched dour tone that prevents even leads Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell from generating any believable chemistry.
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