The problem with “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” isn’t the journey itself. It’s that we never understand why these two particular travelers belong on it together.
Kogonada, who gave us “Columbus” and “After Yang,” brings his singular visual sensibility to this romantic fantasy, and the result looks absolutely magnificent. Working with cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, he crafts a world where memory and reality blur like watercolors bleeding together, where the GPS doesn’t just give directions but opens doorways into the past. Every frame carries the precision we’ve come to expect. This is a filmmaker who knows how to make images breathe. The film never drags. It moves with a confidence that keeps you watching.
Arjun Bhasin’s costumes do expressive character work throughout, each outfit marking inner states and moments in time. Yet this only deepens the frustration: the film understands how to externalize psychology through wardrobe, but not how to build the central relationship that would justify all this craft.
Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell are committed as Sarah and David, two strangers who meet at a wedding and embark on a mystical journey guided by an enchanted GPS. They’re sincere. They’re trying. But why them? The script, for all its ambition, never answers this. They share screen time, they visit pivotal moments from their lives, but they never feel like two pieces that fit. There’s no moment where you think, “Of course. These two understand each other in a way no one else could.” The writing simply doesn’t make the case.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge appears as a German car rental saleswoman (or maybe Austrian? The specifics blur, and doesn’t matter), and she’s terrific, funny, warm, grounded in a way that makes you wish the film had more of her energy. She brings humanity (ironic that the german brings humanity to this film btw) to what could have been a throwaway role.
The film has been savaged by critics, and I won’t pretend it’s entirely successful. But it’s not the disaster some reviews suggest. There’s a difference between failing because you’re lazy and failing because you’re reaching just beyond your grasp. This is the latter. It’s trying to blend “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with some Studio Ghibli style soft worldbuilding, trying to find profundity in whimsy, trying to say something about how we’re shaped by our pasts and choices. That it doesn’t quite succeed is disappointing, but the attempt itself has value.
What worries me is that Hollywood will look at this and the disaster of that one fuckass star wars disney series (i think he directed couple episodes) and decide Kogonada is the problem. That would be a mistake. The direction is elegant, assured, never less than watchable. A director can only do so much with a script that hasn’t done the foundational work. Kogonada remains one of our most visually interesting filmmakers, someone who can hold on a doorway or a gesture until it unlocks something unexpected in you. To let one flawed film tarnish that reputation would be its own kind of failure, one of imagination and nerve.
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” looks great, moves well, and features committed performances. It just needed a better reason for these two people to fall in love (its like yeah what do they have in common? both were kids right…) That’s a writing problem, not a directing one. And in a landscape of films engineered by algorithm and built by committee, there’s still something to be said for the ones that fail on their own strange terms.