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It's taken me a while to get round to watching this.
It is interesting, visually, in the sense that it's portrayed as a sort of montage of memories (and dreams) of the main character, impressions of life, and I thought it was successful in portraying impressions of a 1950s childhood, well acted by the main child actor and Pitt.
With the scene on the beach, I wondered whether the whole film was intended as his life flashing before his eyes before dying (although if this is the case, why start it in the way it was started, why include nothing from his later life?).
I think this hits the nail on the head. This film doesn't feel 'joined up'.
The scenes of space and cells were nice to look at, but unless Malik went up on the hubble telescope, he can't really take credit for them, and he hasn't even done a good job of making them relevant to the human story. (Which is in itself barely a story.)
I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.
It is interesting, visually, in the sense that it's portrayed as a sort of montage of memories (and dreams) of the main character, impressions of life, and I thought it was successful in portraying impressions of a 1950s childhood, well acted by the main child actor and Pitt.
With the scene on the beach, I wondered whether the whole film was intended as his life flashing before his eyes before dying (although if this is the case, why start it in the way it was started, why include nothing from his later life?).
It's too bad that Malick doesn't succeed in connecting those profound questions with the story that he's telling. The images about the origin of the planet are visually spectacular, but also quite hollow and useless. Sean Penn gets a screen time of about 10 minutes and during that time, all he does is look tormented and the questions that the characters ask themselves don't really feel like they make sense in the characters development, but seem to be asked simply because Malick wants to ask them.
The scenes of space and cells were nice to look at, but unless Malik went up on the hubble telescope, he can't really take credit for them, and he hasn't even done a good job of making them relevant to the human story. (Which is in itself barely a story.)
I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.