A Big Bold Beautiful Journey info:
Director: Kogonada
Writer: Seth Reiss
Starring: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Kevin Kline
Hello and welcome to another week here at 1guysmindlessmoviereviews.com. Welcome to October, a very busy time of the year. Along with your usual work and school routines, you also have sports, fall activities, and Halloween preparations. Not to mention the MLB playoffs and a fantasy football team to worry about. Thankfully, I found some time to see a movie because you have to enjoy the little things too. Even if those little things turn out to be a big, bold, beautiful journey. But before I reveal any major spoilers, if you haven’t watched this week’s movie and want to avoid spoilers, you might want to visit my site and check out my other reviews.
Review:
So, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” had all the potential to be big and bold, but was merely mild most of the time. It’s a shame, too, because Director Koganada had both Robbie and Farrell at his disposal. The main issue was that they had no on-screen chemistry. For what was largely a love story, the two main characters just didn’t pair well together. They are both thrown together and shouldn’t have worked for many reasons, but somehow they do anyway.
So, how did we get here? Well, David (Farrell) has an issue with his car, and since he needs to get to a wedding, he calls a local car rental company whose advertisement was hanging right next to where his car was. When he arrives to get a car, the only two workers are a woman (Waller-Bridge) and a man (Kline) sitting behind a table. They offer him one of two vehicles (both Saturns for some reason…does that company even exist anymore?) and are very passive-aggressive about him getting the GPS package.
He makes it to the wedding, where he is introduced to Sarah (Robbie). The two hit it off in a very awkward way and meet up again later in the evening, and it’s even more bizarre. This is when the story takes its first big turn. David’s GPS speaks up and asks him if he wants to go on a big bold beautiful journey. When he agrees, it has him take an exit to stop and get a burger at Burger King (nice product placement there). When he sits down to eat, he looks up and sees Sarah sitting there eating a burger as well. So fate (or the weird GPS) has brought them back together.
When Sarah’s car won’t start, she hops in with David, and they begin their journey together. What happens over the next hour or so is them driving to random destinations where they find doors in the middle of nowhere. As they go through the doors, they each take turns seeing parts of their lives that helped shape them into the people they are today. Some of the moments are heartbreaking, while others are just eye-opening experiences that they missed out on.
Between David’s constant search for the right woman and Sarah’s relentless wave of ending relationships early, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” does its best to make you think about your own life and the choices you’ve made. What moments have you missed out on because you were somewhere you shouldn’t have been, or how your life could have gone a different way if you had handled a certain situation better?
It appears that the two main characters are destined to be alone and not with each other as they go their separate ways after they each end the journey quickly. But the connection they had was too strong to keep them apart, as they met back up at the end to be together. What’s the point of a love story if the main pair doesn’t end up together, right?
Overall, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is a decent story. It is a love story that ultimately has a happy ending, but at what cost? The filmmakers tried so hard to make David and Sarah a couple despite consistently making them incompatible. Not sure why they tried to tell the story in two different ways at the same time. It honestly made the happy ending more unbelievable. However, the acting was good and the concept was something new and different, but I just can’t get past the flaws, so this ends up with a 5 out of 10.
Watch or wait?
New feature this week, as I let you know if you should go watch this in a movie theater or wait till it gets released for streaming. In this case, the journey isn’t so big and bold that it has to be seen on a big screen. No real cinematic scenes that require the largest screen you can find. Instead, this can be enjoyed later at home.
Ok, that’s it for me this week. But now I want to hear from you. What did you think of “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey”? Did you find the same struggles with the characters as I did, or did you like that they were brought together regardless? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, and I will be back next week with a mindless movie review of some sort.
