Cloyed flow

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2014)

A question loomed in mind while seeing this. We follow the true story that allows us to tangle with loss and destruction, letting the sombre realization of human frailty in the face of cosmic waves overwhelm us, so that in the end we'll be cleansed by the miraculous power of life to sometimes set up the most impossible redemption.
It happens. It affirms the purpose of not losing sight of loved ones, of looking and nurturing their presence over an unknowable distance. It does let us experience briefly the loss and sorrow of those whose stories weren't so fortunate. And it appears, with respect for those who truly lost that day, in a light that extends this purpose of anticipated reunion in a larger sense.
Yet the rarity of this story, the fact that it ends with this family safe and whole, keeps it from feeling intellectually satisfying, it's just not the feeling so many must have boarded their last flights home with. So the point for me, the real challenge in making a film like this, would be a film that keeps the same vital realizations above but folds them in a more encompassing manner.
The realizations are powerful and visual: anticipation of presence, uncertainty, fundamental ambiguity as survivors hope and search but it may well be in vain, presence in a larger sense as still carrying the vision of loved ones among ruins of life, a life now understood to have been a thin, a superficial veneer the ocean rolled up; it doesn't matter that they could go to a fancy hotel resort but that they were together.
A fundamental answer for me lies in the visual logic that connects scenes. Here this logic is linear; find, lose and find again, building to the final salvation, an emotional moment but it fizzles quickly because we realize there's so much that's been left behind in the wreckage.
So how would it be for these to be ambiguously shuffled? Malick would know just how. He has similarly immense backdrops, war, history, creation, but they are re-arranged by the power of internal recollection. Start not necessarily with what happens first but what color you want for the urge. I know I would put near the end the image of everyone together on the beach the night before sending out paper lanterns into the sky. How would you choose to remember?