Awakening to Malick's Brilliance
Part of the "creation sequence" from The Tree of Life . Part of the "into the monolith sequence" from 2001 . I have been a Terrence Malick fan for years. My first exposure to him was seeing Days of Heaven (1978) in college. While the film impressed me as sort of a “landscape movie” I did not fully appreciate Malick’s style – which was still emerging at the time. The film remained on my mind for awhile, however. I just didn’t take much notice of that fact and eventually I forgot it. My next encounter with Malick came many years later when I saw his re-make of The Thin Red Line (1998). I experienced that film as a “psychological war movie,” unique in that genre. I first saw it on VHS and then later on DVD. It was a film I revisited regularly through the years because it haunted me. I did not understand why even though it was obviously very well made. It wasn’t until after I saw The New World (2005) that I began to grasp Malick as an