the ultimate hipster movie. visually stunning, intellectually interesting, but unforgivably slow and boring

Rating: 4/10 (22 June 2015)

This movie has all the ingredients of a classic - good actors, an awesome never-before seen visual style for the near future, interesting dialogue, a clever and kind of novel story...
Unfortunately, what absolutely killed this movie for me was that it is way, way too long. This movie has absolutely no business of being more than 1:20. It's length feels forced, it's like the movie is so in love with its own visual style that it cannot help but move from one scene with a nice backdrop to another with a cool time lapse to another back-flash montage etc etc etc. It's like it's moving in circles.
But the thing is: it's basically all monologue. The movie's cool backdrops non-withstanding, it could just as well be an audio book. All you do is watch the main character talk talk talk talk, with no other persons on screen most of the time. While the acting is above-average, we could not sit through the whole movie in one go. My girlfriend got really sleepy after what seemed to us like 90 minutes, yet when i checked, only 50 minutes had elapsed. When we finished the movie on the next day, it felt again like two hours.
Don't get me wrong - I do not dislike slow movies in general, quite the contrary. But this movie is not only slow, there is just nothing to see on the screen except for a hipster fashion parade of the future. You might as well close your eyes.
Its a general tendency nowadays for almost all movies except for cheap popcorn-flicks to run for at least two hours. Even senseless blockbuster action flicks nowadays have no shame running two and a half hours or even three hours, and that length isn't justified by a huge story arc, but only achieved by lots of filler scenes, or - in the case of "Her" - by repeating its main ingredients over and over and over.
At the bottom line, this is what this came down to for me: a movie that is so in love with its own greatness that it is unwilling to let go and just move on. This makes it the ultimate hipster movie, even more than all the moustaches and sci-fi hipster fashion.