So, imagine how disappointed I was when I finally saw the “Tree of Life”. The Taiwanese couple next to me kept on whispering little jokes about when it was going to end, which I found irritating, until I realized that the movie was about to end and this was his summation, and I realized that irritating couple had been right all along. I was the only foreigner in the theater, and I walked out with my head slumped to my chest in shame!
For some reason, although I was not in love with the Matrix, this reminds me of the first sequel (or, whichever one it was with the gun battle on the highway). The movie was cut up into boring twenty-minute chapters: mind-numbing chase scene, pseudo-philosophical conversation, fight scene, etc.
Towards the beginning, I thought the movie had some promise, although I felt a slight twinge of fear that it was going to veer off into navel-gazing. I think that there might have been a good movie in all the footage that Malick is known for shooting, if he had edited it properly. But, I suspect that Malick can’t come to any convincing conclusions about Life, which is a pity, since I thought he did such a masterful job in the Thin Red Line!
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