A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is not for me. There’s part of me that wishes it was, and another part of me that’s glad it’s not. That’s not to say Journey is for no one. Watch this movie for 10 minutes, and you can feel it’s bound to be someone’s absolute favorite. Their raison d’être. I don’t know who, exactly, but I know they’re out there.

That makes A Big Bold Beautiful Journey—written by Seth Reiss and directed by Kogonada—a fragile movie. There is not one instance of irony, not one ounce of cynicism. The whole thing is shockingly sincere. So much so that it’s bound to put off more than a few audience members. Journey is an easy movie to tear into, and I suspect many will. Hopefully, the right people will find it and protect it before the wrong people rip it to shreds. I can’t count myself in the former category, but I’ll do my best not to join the latter.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is not a fantasy romance, but a fantasy about romance—a meaningless demarcation, maybe, but it might be useful. Our two lovers, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie), meet-awkward at a wedding and don’t get much better. Both are single and lonely: David because he loves desire so much that he can’t face reality; Sarah because she was hurt so bad that she now hurts others as a defense. Beyond their emptiness, they don’t have much in common besides this screenplay.

The wedding encounter does not end in fireworks or a night of passion, and on David’s drive home, his sentient GPS—a chunky device that looks like Hal 9000 is playing Tron—asks him if he would like to go on a big, bold, beautiful journey. David relents, and the GPS directs him to a nearby fast-food restaurant for a cheeseburger. Lo and behold, Sarah is there as well. Fancy that. And Sarah’s car won’t start. Well, well. Will wonders never cease?

You see, the day David was supposed to drive to the wedding, his car got the boot for being illegally parked, and David followed a sketchily made sign for a car rental service where the operators (Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline) stock only two cars and both are late-90s era Saturns with the fancy GPS installed. David takes one. Sarah, apparently, got the other. Now her Saturn is dead, and so she climbs into David’s for their big, bold, beautiful journey together.

The journey may be big (it encompasses both of their pasts), it may be bold (at one point, they get to look down on Earth from some celestial position), and it certainly is beautiful (cinematographer Benjamin Loeb maximizes the color palette of Katie Byron’s production design), but no one said anything about it being fun. The GPS directs David and Sarah down desolate roads to doors stuck in the middle of nowhere. These doors are portals into David and Sarah’s memories, and by entering, they get to witness their scar tissue form. David goes back to high school for a musical performance—on the very night the girl of his dreams rejected him. Sarah heads to the hospital to relive her mother’s death. In another, David and Sarah rehash their worst breakups. Humbling moments, sure. And a quick way to get through the messiness of meeting someone, falling in love, and sifting through their past. But ripping off the baggage Band-Aid usually follows the whole fun-as-hell falling-in-love part of the equation. Doing it this way is like skipping the meal, but still wasting the rest of the evening beached on the couch.

The car rental agency, the GPS, the doors in the middle of nowhere, the time travel—David and Sarah don’t seem concerned or curious about how any of this is happening. I was. I spent almost the entirety of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’s 108-minute runtime waiting for something or someone to pull the rug out from under me. Are these the recollections of someone on their deathbed? A futuristic simulation where artificial intelligence tries to understand human interaction? A disquieting dream following a meal of bad shellfish? Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

I think A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is meant to be taken straight. It’s improv: “Yes, and…” GPS starts asking you probing questions? Yes, and… Door in the middle of nowhere that takes you back to high school where everyone treats you like you’re 17 again: Yes, and… Car blows up after striking a deer, and the deer’s guts spill out all over the road—only the guts are harmless fabric and the deer isn’t real: Yes, and…

For the right viewer at the right moment in their life, all of those scenes will play like mantras they’ll stitch on their heart. They’ll see A Big Bold Beautiful Journey and find a reason to get up again and try once more, despite how hard failing is.

At one point in my life, I was that person. I also used to underline sentences in books as if I was afraid I would forget what was meaningful about a passage. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is like a book where entire pages are underlined, and a giant “YES!” is scribbled in the margin. It’s literal to the point of perversion, particularly in the scene where a cover of Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door” plays over the soundtrack while our main characters stand in front of a door. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. But this pipe is screaming: “I’m a fucking pipe! Get it?”

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025)
Directed by Kogonada
Screenplay by Seth Reiss
Produced by Ryan Friedkin, Youree Henley, Seth Reiss, Bradley Thomas
Starring: Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Kevin Kline, Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe
Sony Pictures Releasing, Rated R, Running time 108 minutes, Opens Sept. 19, 2025

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