Apparently nobody told Terrence Malick that the 1970s ended. He even got Douglas Trumball out of retirement to create the jaw dropping special effects sequence that sets the tone for the film. Questionably rendered dinosaurs aside, that silent visual poem depicting the birth of the universe was one of the most profound cinematic experiences I have ever been a part of. It was powerful and moving and brilliantly made without using hardly any CGI. This movie is an absolute throwback to the artistic golden age of Hollywood, when movie theaters were awash with the visionary genius of directors like Nicolas Roeg, Stanley Kubrick and the man himself, Terrence Malick, who plopped out a pair of masterpieces and then vanished for two decades before coming back with stupendously bad timing and making a World War 2 epic that had to compete with the far more accessible and crowd-pleasing Saving Private Ryan.
Now Malick is the Last of the Auteurs. Given the current structure of the industry, films like this just don't get made, as evidenced by the amount of hoops the movie had to jump through to find a distributor... compounded by the fact that Malick took forever and a day and blew several deadlines trying to perfect his vision. He's a true artist in that respect. Unfortunately, there's nothing investors and executives hate more than a true artist, because they are hugely unprofitable. On the plus side, Europeans like incomprehensible art house films so much that The Tree of Life snagged the top award at Cannes and it looks like Malick can vanish again on a high note if he wants to.
As for the film itself, I think it is Brad Pitt's best work as an actor. I think that the cinematography is extraordinary - as someone else pointed out, and as the promotional poster above demonstrates, you could pick just about any frame from this film, blow it up and it would be an extraordinary piece of art. I loved the easy naturalism between the boys. I love the quick cuts, the frantic pump of life, the lyricism, the silences and the score, the shadows, the way he shoots natural light and trees and insects and birds. The voice-overs are a toss-up. You can't have Malick without voice-overs, it’s a package deal. Days of Heaven was two hours of beautiful visual cinema while Richard Gere grumbled inaudibly in the background and slept in a pile of hay. Personally I find it very hard to listen to voice-overs because I can't concentrate on what is being said, but the doubts, the prayers and the questions whispered into the Void achieved a nice aesthetic effect. But I also think his films are at their best when they are wordless.
I did not like the ending. I probably need to watch it again, but I thought it was lame. Movies like this always walk a fine line between genius and pretension. The ending crossed over into pompous self-absorbed surrealist territory for me and was hoping Malick would go in a different direction. I also thought, from a narrative perspective, that he dwelt on the home life too much. This film was at its mesmerizing best when it was just a beautifully scored, wordless visual journey - it was able to capture something of the inexpressible magnitude of life, the universe and everything in it during those sequences. I thought it bogged down a bit focusing on the family life too much. I was hoping for some more Big Bangs with operatic vocals.
Plenty of people will hate this movie for being a piece of art house trash. Others will call it a masterpiece. But one thing you cannot deny is that it is a beautiful, bold vision and the great thing about art is that we can all be right.