“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey”: A Tumblr Moodboard Come to Life
What happens when you mix troubled millennials, confusing magical objects, and 2010s visuals with 2020s bad writing? Nothing good, I promise you. Let’s talk about A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.
Picture this. It’s 2014, you are in your mid-teens, and you want to be the next great writer, someone that inspires a generation. You want to write something profound, full of wisdom and life-changing reflections. However, you’re only fifteen, you have no knowledge of real life, you have spent more time reading fanfiction than actual books, and you think The Fault in Our Stars is the best romantic movie ever made. But you start writing anyway and come up with some pages.
This is the backstory I imagined for how A Big Bold Beautiful Journey came to exist: a teenager who published something on Wattpad and was so lucky as to get discovered by some greedy executive. Big and bold was my surprise when, after a short Google search, I found out that this was written by the same guy who wrote The Menu! (What happened, my friend?) And it was directed by another grown man.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is one of those projects that make you wonder how studios decide which ones to greenlight. At this point, I honestly believe they just pull titles out of a hat and stick with whatever comes up.
This is how you end up with a film that is the cinematographic equivalent to a Taylor Swift song: big and “poetic” words sold to you as insightful but that are actually quite surface level, written to sell vibes, not meaning.
So I invite you on a big, bold, sad journey to find out why this movie is not worth anyone’s time.
What is The Film About?
In essence, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey wants to be a story about two lonely people who need to learn how to open up. The two main characters embark on an odd road trip, guided by a magical GPS that takes them on a tour of their memories so they can rediscover themselves. An idea that could have gone somewhere, with a relatively competent script.
Colin Farrell is a very troubled man. Why? I’m not sure, but he looks like he has not shaved in a while, and his car was towed away. He has to get to a wedding, so he decides to rent a car at the Car Rental Office, whose sign magically appears behind him.
Colin arrives at this office, and it starts raining. Because rain is aesthetic. There is a lot of rain in this movie, so I hope you brought an umbrella. He has some trouble getting inside because both employees are dumbasses. As soon as I heard the voice that answered through the buzzer, I experienced a familiar sense of annoyance, but I could not put my finger on why. When Colin finally finds the people that took his reservation, I realized one of the employees is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Phoebe convinces Colin to take an old car that comes with a GPS, and he drives to the wedding. Once there, she meets Margot Robbie, and they have an extremely awkward and nonsensical conversation. The dialogue is unnatural; no human being speaks like that. And this is when the movie’s urge to be “deep” comes in full display. It is obvious that the writer wanted these characters to sound intelligent and witty, but the whole thing is very sophomoric, to the point that it makes the audience uncomfortable.
The wedding comes to an end, and when Colin gets into his car to drive back, the GPS comes alive and asks him if he wants to go on the “big, bold, beautiful journey”. And instead of wondering why the GPS is talking to him, he accepts. Not long after, Colin realizes Margot is doing the same, and the GPS orders them to travel together.
Big, Bold, and Boring
From then on, the rest of the film is Colin and Margot following the GPS instructions and finding doors that take them back to important moments of their pasts. We could say that they traveled back in time, but the whole thing is quite inconsistent.
Sometimes both characters visit the memories together; sometimes each goes their own way to their respective memories. At times the people around them do not pay any mind to their presence, and at other times they treat both as if they were their younger selves. There is also a scene when Colin talks to his teenage self, but as his own dad. It’s weird; the magic of the GPS does not seem to have any logic, and events just happen one after another.
Most of the time, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a montage of characters doing things with nice music in the background, more like a music video than a movie. I felt personally offended that they used “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes, one of my favorite love songs, as a condiment for such a pathetic project.
Welcome to Tumblr
There are some pretty shots of landscapes, and the director made sure to dress Margot Robbie in a red coat so she creates a nice contrast with the background. There are some style choices that seem to be very intentional, and this is maybe why the movie had such a 2014 vibe for me: it looks like a Tumblr post. The collages of pictures or GIFs with sounding phrases and reflections. Most of the time they did not hold much meaning, but they looked pretty and sounded inspirational.
As I’ve already mentioned, the dialogues were painful to listen to. They are something I could have considered witty and deep in my teens, but for a product directed to a grown-up audience, it is laughable to hear phrases like “we all act,” “doors are tricky,” or “I’m afraid to hurt you” delivered by the actors like they were actually saying something important. I tend to complain a lot about how terrible movie dialogues have become (activists are not very good writers, I must say), but A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is easily one of the worst-written movies I have watched in the past years.
Hollywood: Sponsored By Your Favorite Fast Food Brand
Nothing says “deep and inspirational” as the characters interrupting a scene to read a Burger King ad.
I have previously complained about the shameful amount of product placement we are seeing in films these days. Remember that just six months ago, we saw a Snickers bar destroying a high-security scientific facility in Jurassic World: Rebirth. They are not even trying to hide the ads. But A Big Bold Beautiful Journey managed to do an even worse job.
A Burger King Romance
The two protagonists arrive at the same place, with the GPS order to get “a fast food cheeseburger.” They meet and have a conversation about how weird it is to call it “a fast food cheeseburger” when the actual name of the order is “a Whopper with cheese”, a phrase they repeat three or four times in the conversation. Not being a regular consumer of fast food, I did not get what was going on and assumed it was just bad writing. It was not until one of the last scenes, when I saw a Burger King sign behind Margot Robbie, that I decided to Google what a Whopper with cheese was and discovered I had been fed an ad in the middle of the movie.
I can swallow an ad on YouTube and think it is acceptable because YouTube is free. Ads are a way to monetize the content. But in the case of a theatrical movie, I already paid a ticket to watch something that is supposedly “high quality” and to have a “premium experience.” And in fact, I already watched all the ads that came mixed with the trailers before the movie started! Now I have to watch ads in the movie as well?
If you really must produce this crap, at least hide it away on Netflix! The level of disrespect towards us, the paying customer, is exponential. Then the industry wonders why they do not sell tickets anymore. Not only do they make garbage content and try to sell it at a high price, but now they want to rip us off even more by charging us for content full of advertising!
This is how devalued the industry really is: we have two Academy Award nominees selling cheeseburgers. Sorry, “Whoppers with cheese ”.
Reception and Box Office
Of course it didn’t work out! It might be hard to believe for Hollywood, but we are actually not that stupid.
With a budget of $45.000.000, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey only got an embarrassing $20.000.000 at the worldwide box office. And honestly, it deserved even less.
No one involved in this movie has any respect for their craft, nor their audience. They are mercenaries of the worst kind and deserve to disappear.
And they will. Their time is coming.
