Are Hot Girls People Too? (Yes, Despite All Evidence to the Contrary) 

A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey was too good for me to resist. Literally, the trailer seemed tailor-made for me. It wasn’t because of the actors (who I like), though, or even the genre (which I tolerate), but the doors. I used to tell everyone I could that my ideal date would be walking around with someone, finding interesting doors and making up stories of what was behind them…

God, I should have written this movie.

Because, well, what can I say about A Big Bold Beautiful Journey? Given that I stopped watching 50% of the way through, you'd assume only 50% of what I could have if I’d continued. But really, I didn't need to go any further. I’d already taken away the only thing I ever could have from the film:

Hot girls are people too, dammit.

Really, I should have seen the warning signs from the start. That hat that Margot Robbie wears in the trailer was suspect, to say the least, and the fact that I keep thinking Blake Lively played the lead should tell you all you need to know. At first, I thought the film was just quirky, and it is. Weird Germans giving Colin Farrell a rental car with a magical GPS? Spectacular.

And then, Robbie comes onscreen. She takes off her heels, she’s scared of hurting him, but also she suddenly wants to marry him and I just gag. While I wasn’t a huge fan of Barbie, I at least respected Robbie’s talent, yet all of a sudden I was questioning everything.

Why is she questioning his accent?

Why is she so obsessed with cheeseburgers, and why does she eat them like that?

What is up with her clothes?

It’s almost like she’s having a mental crisis. Like she’s manic, even –

Oh.

Big? I don’t know. Bold? Definitely not. How is it 2025 and we still have manic pixie dream girls onscreen? You can really tell that men made this movie, and indeed the Wikipedia page lists zero women among the director, writer, or producers. Shame on me for blaming Robbie for how terrible her character was. This was never her fault.

Or, well, she signed onto the film I guess, but I’m not going to blame her for wanting a check. The character was going to exist anyway. It’s just shocking to me that she does. Most of the movies I’ve watched about the manic pixie dream girl trope are tearing it apart, not diving headfirst into it without any sense of irony.

Maybe they thought it would be unique that Robbie’s character was “older”? That it would be empowering, somehow? I’m just looking for any excuse to convince me that we aren’t still living in a world where a “desirable woman” is someone that’s extremely attractive but super quirky and ALSO deeply broken in a way that only a sad, soulful man can fix.

Because guess what? That’s not a person. That’s a project you can sleep with when you’re done patting yourself on the back for being such a hero.

Now granted, I can’t say that this is a problem that’s entirely exclusive to men. Romance is a genre designed to fulfill fantasies, and women can be just as bad… But can they really? Because while male love interests can be a bit bland, at least from what I’ve seen, they’re still basically human. Most women don’t want a hunky man to save them, they want somebody (admittedly a hot somebody) to fight by their side.

If you need proof, just look at any book from the stupidly popular “romantasy” genre.

A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey is the perfect movie for men who like their women like they like unicorns: fantasies. For anyone else, it’s a dire warning that in some men’s eyes, hot girls should not be people but rather props that facilitate their story. Non-hot girls? Probably don’t even register in their world. After all, why would a woman exist if not to be desired?

I don’t want to be too dramatic, but this movie terrifies me. The fact that this trope is still being used in 2025 is a bad sign for society at large. It’s proof that we’re slipping back towards a worldview where men are allowed to be human while women can only be flawed if it somehow makes them more appealing to men.

I say this as someone who has (unfortunately) been praised as a real-life manic pixie dream girl before: nobody wants a manic pixie dream girl. Not in real life. Because love doesn’t come from how a person looks, or what they do for you. It comes from who they are.

So yes, hot girls are great. But they’re also people. And if studios want to make a movie that actually makes us feel something, they’re going to have to go a little further than skin deep to give us all the messy chaos that lies within. Because looks can only go so far, but humanity? That’s bold. That’s beautiful.