a tone poem, quite in consonance with Wagner's romantic music

Rating: 10/10 (18 October 2006)

I had an epiphany watching this movie, I've seen all four of Malick's movies and there is clearly a trend, there is less and less privileging of the human, particularly as being different from or above "the world" I've always been transfixed by his movies, the power of silence and the small gesture, Private Witt attending to the battle shaken GI at the edge of the river, simply pouring water over the crying GI, a small scene so full of grace, as were the beautiful gestures of pocahontas indicating the sky, water, wind, with her body. Then to another scene, the enveloping music, a human figure small against a large landscape, time goes slow then suddenly fast, the transposition of a wild virginia landscape with the "captured" gardens, "naturals" in each, the idea of "the new world" completely subverted, the terrible loss of her people, her belonging, so understated, but so powerful, the carrying on of life, and obviously death, the beginning and end of the movie are actually a circle. You can tell yourself creation stories from Malick's movies, you can cry simply from complete sadness or joy or some admixture. What drives this movie is emotion, it is the one sustained element in all his movies, while other things cinema may lapse such as plot or dialogue or narrative, the emotional tone simply builds on itself. Malick is an impressionist above all else. There are many intellectual threads that underpin this movie, whether from transcendentalism, the bible, lao tzu, etc, no one is ascendant, the point is that the artistic moment is its own entity, obviously with many influences. I would hate to have to write about movies for a living, I am seldom moved to do so, but this is different, I'm a writer who thinks Malick is introducing something completely different into the cinema, we still do not even know what it is completely (like all powerful art) , but we feel it, are affected by it, moved to some kind of response. Plot doesn't matter here, directed dialogue may or may not occur, voice overs are like the continuation of a reverie already going in my own mind, even waiting for his next movie, so long in coming, is part of the power of Malick's art.