It's hard to explain how good this movie is!

Rating: 10/10 (8 July 2019)

No matter what your quarrel with the opening scenes is -- and the first shot after the title *is* admittedly striking -- you find yourself sitting there, and sitting there, and the rapture and the lushness and the humanness sweep over you until you're back in "it" again, brought ashore (as it were) by Sean Penn's character.
How to explain it? The cutting goes zig-zag, across *people*, and you can't tell where it's coming from. The grass is as indifferent as the sky and you might not live to see another day. Who is that said you might die out *here*?
Transmuting this experience is powerful. Malick draws off of everything Kubrick and Coppola did and didn't pull off (mostly did, and then mostly *didn't*, -- respectively -- I would say ... ) to bring us this.
Somehow, too, you can see Malick's pictures as having been before-and-after this one. (I've seen them all but "The New World.") This is the pivot point. This is back from "The Tree of Life," and forward from "Days of Heaven."
Don't miss it!