I Finally Watched Lonely Planet: Great Leads, but Everything Else Falls Flat

I finally fired up Netflix in 2026 and gave Lonely Planet a proper shot. I'm a sucker for a sun-drenched romantic drama, and with Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth leading the charge, I figured the odds were pretty solid. But man, the film left me with that frustrating "what could have been" taste in my mouth. The Moroccan backdrop is gorgeous, the two leads are easy on the eyes and genuinely talented, but the whole thing gets kneecapped by one massive problem: almost every character outside the two protagonists is as flat as a pancake.

Let me set the scene. Dern plays Katherine Loewe, a famous writer who is stuck in a brutal case of writer's block. She heads to a fancy writing retreat in Morocco to shake the cobwebs loose. There she bumps into Owen Brophy, played by Hemsworth, a guy tagging along with his girlfriend Lily Kemp, who happens to be an up-and-coming writer herself. Owen and Lily's relationship is already circling the drain, and the movie wastes no time showing you that Katherine is meant to be the breath of fresh air Owen needs. So far, so standard for a romance drama.

Here's where the wheels start wobbling. Lily, played by Diana Silvers, is written as a one-note villain. Her entire job in the script is to make Katherine look like a saint by comparison. There's a party game where literary references get thrown around, and Lily keeps dunking on Owen for not being clever enough. It's meant to make you root for Katherine when she steps in and reassures Owen that his clues were actually better than the ones Lily wanted. But honestly, all it did was make me roll my eyes. Instead of giving Owen and Lily a complicated, messy breakup, the movie just paints Lily as a selfish, cruel, egotistical nag so we don't feel bad when Owen's eyes start wandering. That's lazy writing, plain and simple.

And it's not just Lily who gets the short end of the stick. Katherine's ex-lover Ugo shows up at the retreat, and his defining personality trait is basically "still pining for Katherine." That's it. No real arc, no inner life, just a warm body to create a little romantic friction. For a movie set at a writer's retreat—where you'd expect a colorful cast of eccentrics—most of the supporting players barely register. They're set dressing. The movie is so laser-focused on the central romance that it forgets to build a world around it.

Now, to be fair, the chemistry between Dern and Hemsworth is legit. These two are seasoned pros, and they do their best with the material. Even with the age gap making things a bit awkward—like when Katherine calls Owen "kid" during a tender moment, which hit my ear like a record scratch—they still manage to sell the connection. You can see why they'd be drawn to each other. Dern brings that grounded, soulful energy, and Hemsworth has the easy charm to make Owen more than just a handsome face. If the script had given them more nuance, this could have been a knockout.

But good performances can't paper over a hollow story. The romance between Katherine and Owen comes at the expense of everything else. Owen's complicated relationship with his job is mentioned and then mostly dropped. Katherine's writer's block, which should be the emotional engine of the movie, gets resolved without much real struggle. The beautiful Moroccan setting is used more like a screensaver than a living, breathing place. I kept waiting for the film to dig below the surface, but it never really did.

Let me break down the key issues as I see them:

Despite all that, Lonely Planet isn't a total wash. If you're in the mood for something light, pretty, and easy to watch on a lazy Sunday, it'll scratch that itch. But if you go in expecting the depth of a great romantic drama, you might find yourself checking your phone. I'd land it around a 6/10. It had plenty of potential—the leads, the setting, the premise—but it fumbled the supporting cast and left too many intriguing threads dangling.

At the end of the day, Lonely Planet reminded me of a beautiful postcard: lovely to look at, but when you flip it over, there's not much written on the back. Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth deserve better, and honestly, so do we.