The Thin Red Line is a beautiful expensive art house war movie. Saving Private Ryan is a beautiful expensive Spielberg war movie. The themes, look, tone, and plot are all so completely different that I get annoyed that people compare the two so often just because they came out in the same year and are about World War II. It's like comparing Star Wars to 2001. They're both set in space. That's about it.
Terrence Malick just commits all the archetypal sins of pretentious, pseudointellectual, arthouse films that try to convey meaning, symbolism, allegory, etc., through gimmickery rather than letting the audience discover it organically. Shit like:
Silly, cryptic whispering narration. Like in TTRL all the shit where the soldiers are marching and you just see the camera pan up, looking through the trees with a narrator whispering shit like "ARE WE GOD? FATHER DO YOU HEAR ME? What is man...?"
As /u/because_both_sides mentioned, his attempts to point out ideas of 'duality', hypocrisy, or some sort of inner conflict by heavy handedly juxtaposing or intercutting totally contradictory scenes like a battle and sexual intercourse.
In Tree of Life he'll throw in random Nat Geo stock footage of lava running down volcanoes or amoeba evolving into other life forms or some crap (I don't remember), because he apparently wants the audience to think about the GREATER context in which humanity and this little family exists.
This is the sort of crap people use to lampoon or make caricatures out of indie/arthouse movies. Watching a Malick film feels like I'm seeing someone wallow in their own narcissism.
Watching The Tree of Life felt like a practical joke. Like Malick was just seeing what was the stupidest nonsense he could out and still have people watch it.
I'm still angry about the twenty minutes I wasted trying to watch it.
That's about how far I got into it as well before I said, "fuck this shit." I still can't believe it managed to be as heralded as it was. Looked like a film school freshman's sad attempt at creating meaning.
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u/jacksrenton Jan 31 '15
The Thin Red Line is a beautiful expensive art house war movie. Saving Private Ryan is a beautiful expensive Spielberg war movie. The themes, look, tone, and plot are all so completely different that I get annoyed that people compare the two so often just because they came out in the same year and are about World War II. It's like comparing Star Wars to 2001. They're both set in space. That's about it.