This movie was horrible. The book was full of giant setpieces, mythology and mysticism,with a pervading melancholy. Instead we get this. Impersonal, wooden, and boring.
Joaquin Phoenix was a joke in this movie, why on God's green Earth was he cast as Doc? Sportello isn't an idiot! He's a stoner yes, but not an idiot. Phoenix made him into a total ape. Sure, his animalistic pill-head demeanor worked perfectly in The Master--but not here. It seemed like he didn't even know what his lines meant, just reciting a memorized string of equally unimportant words, read right off the script. And same with a lot of other characters too. Owen Wilson and his wife are just terrible, Reese Witherspoon wasn't even in the same movie.
The movie was way too focused on the plot. Granted, Anderson created in the script, amazingly, a succinct and linear image of the , but by doing so he totally lost the mystique, the ungraspable conspiracy that should have been the heart of the movie. He got so caught up in the workings of the plot that he forgot to sit for a minute and relax and the ambiance that just drips from the books in every sentence. How could he have missed this!?
What in the hell was up with the sex scene on the couch? Paul Thomas Anderson spends his time turning a great brief but hilarious scene from the book into an awkward off-key that goes nowhere in all the time it buys up, instead of taking a few breaths in the nethers of Thomas Pynchon's imagination; an immense landscape--a deeper, more introspective view on the counter-culture than you've ever seen. The director seemed to miss all of this in exchange for shots of Joaquin Phoenix smoking cigarettes in vintage clothing.
Paul Thomas Anderson looks like a hack. What a disappointment. This movie spins its wheels and goes nowhere. No drama. I think he tried to stick too closely to the book, but then if that's the case: why the weird sex scene, and is Big Foot eating the tray of weed? What the fuck was that?
The one redeeming quality of the movie was the narration. I thought the idea of having a minor character narrate, drifting in and out, was really good and I wish he exploited that more.