A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a rom-com with a slightly science-fiction-y bent to it.

Using the conventions of another genre is often great for a nominally romantic film, it can offer concepts and thoughts to better articulate the often hard-to-put-into-words feeling of love.

This is a solid example of this micro-genre but is a little tonally inconsistent.

Kicking off with a comical interaction at a truly offbeat car rental agency, we soon see the conventional ‘meet-cute’ at a wedding.

However, from there our lead couple must traverse through time and space on their journey home as they find doors which lead them into their romantic pasts.

It’s a brilliant idea that, when it works, is truly captivating. Revisiting their, respective, most traumatic breakups in a café is a riveting moment.

It just veers a little too far into the ‘unnecessarily arty’ at times.

Using an empty theatre stage and monologues to camera at certain points doesn’t quite work and the score is a little intrusive and odd in parts, with the use of conventional music at other points fitting a little better.

It’s well-scripted, brilliantly acted, has some lovely imagery and does have some interesting and original thoughts on a well-worn topic but it doesn’t quite add up to the sum of those parts.

⭐️⭐️⭐️