This is the third Terrence Malick film I've seen, and all three have elicited more or less the same reactions from me. Here's a rough play-by-play that applies equally to all three movies:
5 minutes in - Wow, this is pretty.
10 minutes in - Ah, nothing but voice overs and whispers so far. That's cool. He's setting up a nice slow burn here.
25 minutes in - Seriously, this is just fucking gorgeous footage. I wonder when the movie will really start, though.
40 minutes in - Wow, really? We're already forty minutes in? Feels like we've only just scratched the surface of the plot here. I still don't get the sense that I know any of these characters on any level. This will all pay off though, I'm sure.
1 hour in - Holy shit, now that there's some plot to go with all the beautiful scenery, I am loving this movie. Let me grab my computer and read a little bit about it.
1 hour and 15 minutes in - I guess I'll look up from my computer when I can hear something happening in the movie.
1 hour and 30 minutes in - Maybe I'm missing something big in these muffled whispers. Time to shut the computer.
1 hour and 45 minutes in - Really though, this looks so beautiful. I'm still not sure what any of the characters are doing but they all sound so calm and peaceful in their voiceovers and whispered murmurs.
2 hours in - Wait, there's another hour?
2 hours and 15 minutes in - Yeah, I definitely missed something plot-related. Let's open the computer back up and see what it was.
2 hours and 30 minutes in - I guess I didn't miss much, actually. The climax is coming up, though, and I should really pay attention here. Let me close my computer.
2 hours and 40 minutes in - Was that the climax? Didn't really feel all that climactic to me. Or maybe that was the point? Gosh, this is still just so damn pretty.
2 hours and 50 minutes in - And here are the credits. Nice. I think I really liked this movie. I'm not entirely sure what took place or why it took three hours, but it was just so beautiful.
And that's where I'm at right now. Another Malick movie, another visually stunning masterpiece, another futile attempt on my part to try to figure out if I even understood the message here, or whether there even was one at all. An hour in - and again, that seems to be the magical point where my interest peaks in every Malick movie - I was very actively considering whether or not this was the greatest war movie I'd ever seen. Two hours further in, well, no.
Movies are wide-ranging with their intentions and goals, and this was probably the most visually stunning war movie I've ever seen. But despite all its star power and its three-hour run time and its very basic plot (American soldiers push forward into Guadalcanal and take the island away from the Japanese) I made virtually no connection to any of the men on screen as individuals. Oh, hey, Woody Harrelson just blew himself up. I hardly knew him. Oh, geez, Jared Leto just bit it. What was his character even up to in the first place? Oh, wow, that's George Clooney. Hang on, this is literally the final scene of the movie.
Malick's original cut on this one was over five hours long, and in addition to the aforementioned actors - and Sean Penn, John Travolta, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, Nick Nolte, and John C. Reilly - it featured scenes with Billy Bob Thornton, Gary Oldman, Martin Sheen, Bill Pullman, Viggo Mortensen, and Mickey Rourke that were cut entirely. Like, honestly, an all-star cast was cut from this film and it was still overflowing with recognizable faces doing very little beyond walking through amazingly shot landscapes.
I guess Malick decided very late in the editing process that he wanted to remove as much dialogue from the film as possible, reducing it down to little more than three hours of guys walking around on a tropical island and, to be fair, shooting a lot of Japanese soldiers. It made for just a beautiful movie - have I driven that point home hard enough yet? - but one I don't think I'll really remember any characters or moments from, years down the road. And, again, I feel the exact same way about The New World and The Tree of Life.
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