- Director: Kogonada
- Screenplay: Seth Reiss
- Cast: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge
- Cinematography: Benjamin Loeb
- Editing: Susan E. Kim, Jonathan Alberts
- Score: Joe Hisaishi
- Genre: Romantic fantasy
- Runtime: 109 minutes
If you came upon a door randomly placed in the middle of the woods, would you enter through it? What lies behind it?
I would, anticipating some kind of magical occurrence. Anyone curious enough to go on ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey‘ will find nothing more than charm-free, paper-thin nonsense.
Two strangers, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) are thrust together by faux-quirky circumstances wherein the GPS system in the car David is renting instructs him to collect Sarah, who he only met the day before at a wedding. The HAL 9000-like computer encourages them to drive across the countryside from one location to the next, where they encounter doors that open up to formative moments in their lives.
It’s pretty to look at; Kogonada’s use of primary colours is easy on the eye. Don’t blame him for the weak screenplay though. Aiming for something meaningful, the writing is full of puddle-deep platitudes. Farrell and Robbie are talented individually yet their characters don’t fit together at all. The romance developing between them wouldn’t work in the real world. This is a fantasy – or is that just an excuse to throw conflicting forces at each other, confidently declaring that it’s a successful union.
If my GPS started telling me to pick up random women, I’d rip it out my vehicle and launch it out the window. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL”. Perhaps, instead, we should close them and drive off.
My rating: 5 / 10
SilverScreen 