Appallingly misjudged

Rating: 2/10 (22 March 2016)

Terrence Malik is a very strange director. That statement can be taken two ways, both of them applicable to this clunky effort. From the start the film utilises similar techniques and ideas found in "The Thin Red Line" - in fact ever since "Badlands". We hear the thoughts of characters as they reflect on the paradoxes of life'n'lurve'n'conflict. There's a lot of Noble Savage guff going on here and more than a hint of "Last of the Mohicans" - not in a Good Way. I'm reluctant to call any of his movies pretentious because at his best no director manages better to incorporate into his films profound ideas about what it is to be a human being. The Thin Red Line is something of a masterpiece in this respect. It amazes me that he can have so misjudged the pace of the film. All that said the young lead actress is quite magnificent in the role, almost - almost - making it worth enduring the excruciating longueurs which drag the film down over and over again. There are some irritatingly implausible quirks about the way the dialogue is handled too. The perennially difficult issue of how to deal with two languages where neither group can speak or understand the other is incompetently executed. "Slow" in itself seldom bothers me if the content works, but this is a really tedious clunker. I lost interest just over 90 minutes in.