Joaquin Phoenix's Bizarre 2000s Sci-Fi Movie Might Deserve Another Look

Back in 2003, Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg delivered "It's All About Love" and was immediately excoriated by critics for making a movie that was, according to most, an incoherent mess. But the film does have some interesting ideas, and while this certainly isn't a near-perfect sci-fi movie that somehow slipped under the radar, it might one day be considered an underrated sci-fi movie, even if it hasn't quite reached that point yet.

"It's All About Love" is a romantic drama that's also an apocalyptic sci-fi vision of the future. It's a very post-9/11 film. Not in the sense that it's full of terrorists and renewed jingoistic fervor, but in the sense that it has a fairly gloomy outlook, depicting a version of 2021 in which the world teeters on the precipice of doom. It's not exactly the outright dystopian future of, say "Blade Runner" with its techno-industrial nightmare version of 2019. Rather, it's a more restrained kind of dystopia in which people live lives that are, in some ways, recognizable as our own but play out in a rapidly crumbling society.

Amid all of that, married couple John (Joaquin Phoenix) and Elena (Claire Danes) attempt to rekindle their love prior to signing their divorce papers, eventually finding solace in their renewed relationship as the world disintegrates around them. It would have been a touching tale if the film itself wasn't a bit of a slog. But it does feel a little more relevant in 2025 than it likely did upon its release. After all, it's not as if things have gotten all that much better since the immediate post-9/11 years, making the slow degradation of the world in "It's All About Love" feel almost a little too familiar. That's about all that can be said for the movie, though.

"It's All About Love" opens with John, a university lecturer, arriving in New York. All seems normal, and it's only when he reaches the bottom of an escalator and has to step over a dead body quivering at the foot of the machine that we start to recognize this as a much more doom-laden future than the one in which we live today.

In "It's All About Love," the planet has endured extreme global warming so that July is now a snow-filled winterscape. Meanwhile, people around the world are dropping dead due to a mysterious disease that, according to John, has something to do with the heart. The global economy is similarly imperiled, which was a prescient inclusion on Vinterberg and co-writer Mogens Rukov's part ahead of the 2008 recession, and all of it is made somehow worse by the fact the citizens of this gloomy future are simply going about their lives as if nothing is wrong — an all too familiar scenario in our modern world, which continues to function while beset by all manner of calamity. Also, there's Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes at peak hotness.

Phoenix's John is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, figure skater Elena (Danes). As if the body-strewn streets and looming downfall of society wasn't enough, cloning is also a thing in this version of the future, and John learns that his soon-to-be ex-wife has developed a heart condition, prompting her family to clone her four times in order to prolong her figure skating success (and possibly kill the real Elena). But before they sign their divorce papers, and while surrounded by all this absurdity, John and Elena find a renewed love for one another.

In the mid-1990s, Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier founded the Dogme 95 movement, which, to use Vinterberg's short description, was "a set of rules that prevented [directors] from using the more conventional filmmaking tools like artificial light, make up, special effects etc." With "It's All About Love," Vinterberg decided to reject the principles of his own movement, writing that the film was his attempt to "avoid repetition, to take another artistic risk, to explore new territory."

Unfortunately, this grand rebuke of his former doctrine proved to be misguided. "It's All About Love" depicts a strange series of events that don't really hang together. The film seems to be saying something about love being the answer to society's ills, but it's so packed with ideas that no coherent point of view comes to the fore. Still, aside from being sort of fun to watch as a case study in pretentiousness, the movie does feel a little more relevant today than perhaps it did back in 2003. It also has Sean Penn on a plane delivering grandiose voice overs for some reason, as well as some of the worst Polish accents you'll ever hear.

Either way, critics hated this film. In other words, "It's All About Love" certainly isn't Joaquin Phoenix's best movie on Rotten Tomatoes. In fact, it's one of his worst according to the review aggregator, which has the movie at a 19% critic score based on 31 reviews. But on Letterboxd, the movie has a few fans, and even those that don't like it aren't as vehement in their criticism as the contemporaneous reviews. As such, this critically-panned sci-fi movie might be worth your time, but be warned — an interesting mess, but a mess.