With romance movies seeming to follow the same storyline these days, with their endings predictable and boring, I was excited to see where "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” would go. And while not all bad, the movie didn’t live up to my expectations.
Described as a romantic fantasy movie, it follows two characters as they relive memories from their past together. The movie dives into the idea of how every moment in your past has the power to influence who you are now.
The film starts with the introduction of David played by Colin Farrell, a lonely single man whose parents continuously encourage him to get out there and meet someone. So he tries to get to a friend's wedding which he is going to alone. Sarah, played by Margot Robbie, is then introduced at the wedding: a single but not so interested in a relationship girl. The two catch each other's eye during the ceremony, but Sarah quickly looks away. At the reception, the bride introduces them. David seems interested in talking to her, but Sarah quickly walks away to dance.
I definitely thought that the film took an interesting route in portraying its romance storyline. With flashbacks to both characters' pasts, it almost had a coming-of-age feel to it as they navigated through past events of their life, finding new ways to deal with the problems and feelings brought on by them. Each new memory revealed something new about one of them, both to the other character and the audience.
At the beginning of the movie, they seemed to me like boring characters whose only descriptors were single and lonely. Throughout the movie, however, each new memory allowed the characters to grow and become more interesting.
The main premise of the movie follows David and Sarah as they go on a road trip with them reliving their old memories on the way. Not only was this an interesting storytelling device, but the road trip called for some very visually appealing scenes. Many of the shots when they were on the road included beautiful scenery and others included very distinctive angles that added interest to the scene and made it hard as a viewer to look away.
While the movie provides an interesting take on the romance genre, it wasn’t perfect. As I was watching, there were a few things that I didn’t enjoy.
For starters, some of the dialogue felt off to me, especially in the beginning of the movie. The way that David and Sarah spoke to each other didn’t seem like the way most people talk when they first meet. It didn’t seem intentional either, more like the writers didn’t know what to have them say to each other in the beginning, so they made them kind of flirt in a really awkward way.
While it’s normal for plot elements to go intentionally unmentioned and then revealed later on in the film, some things were revealed to just be tossed away and never mentioned again. One of these elements being that David’s mother left him and his dad when he was a kid. It felt so insignificant that they didn’t even show a memory of this moment, they just had David tell Sarah about it and never bring it up again.
It was Sarah’s character that seemed to have a lot more struggles in her life growing up. From her mom dying when she was 19 to her seemingly MIA father, it was clear she’d had it rough growing up. So, with all this other drama in the movie, David bringing up that his mother left him when he was a kid didn’t really add anything to the story. That whole element of his character being part of the storyline seemed like it was there so that he could “catch up” with Sarah and her trauma, instead of actually adding anything to his character.
While I appreciate the creativity of the movie and the visually appealing scenes, for me the execution just wasn’t there. With awkward dialogue and sometimes random story lines “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” missed the mark.
