Terrence Malik has one good movie

And that movie is Badlands.

Just prior to it's release, the Thin Red Line caused an enormous stir in that it was to be the first movie released by a reclusive 'legendary' director Terrence Malik. So, I got to check out the work of a 'master' moviemaker in a war flick. Sounded good to me. Today, if someone were to ask me what was the movie I hated the most, it would be The Thin Red Line, even though it gained much praise from critics.

Recently, I was browsing through the library's movie section and came across the two movies that Malik built his reputation on, Badlands and Days of Heaven. I just had to know what made people so excited by the director of Thin Red Line. Well, I'll tell you this, Badlands is a near perfect movie. The focused use of voiceover (a Malik trademark), exciting story, great performances, and an effectively captured rural setting made Badlands a riveting watch. It is a pocket-epic, of sorts, as a dynamic story is delivered in a lean 95 minutes. Days of Heaven, on the other hand, suffered as it plodded through a not-so-interesting story, while retaining some great shots of open skies and nature and respectful use of voiceover. The thing is, I really don't care for widescreen nature shots. They're fine and all, but I grew up on the prairies and such images have been the backdrop to so many of my mundane and banal life episodes that it simply doesn't do anything for me. Further, I don't think movies are an effective media to deliver such visions. In Badlands, these shots worked with the story and were part of the story, but in Days of Heaven, they interrupted and distracted from the story.

The Thin Red Line, then, follows the trajectory of Days of Heaven with an exponential downturn of quality. The visions of nature make the audience actively frustrated, as they interrupted scenes with long nonsense images. The voiceover was TERRIBLE: open-ended, wussy, omnipresent, etc. Listening to some guy, in some innocently naive and detached yet smug manner, repeat 'profound' and 'deep' garbage like "Who is killing me ..... Who am I killing ..... Why am I here ...." over the entire movie was simply ridiculous. The story was directionless (not 'dreamlike'), the distracting subplots imploded (like the girlfriend at home we are never introduced to, staring out the window for extended parts of the movie, ends up leaving the soldier for another man and is never heard from again), the naked black babies swimming got too much camera time, and nothing about the movie held attention. And it's LONG, too. Over 180 minutes! Before looking at your watch at the end of the movie, you'd swear four precious hours of your only life on earth had been wasted, but alas, you find you are only three hours closer to death. It was the closest I've ever come to walking out of a movie. I thought that The Thin Red Line fell into my prejudice about pacifist directors not knowing how to make a war movie, but after watching Days of Heaven, I realized that it was just Malik being Malik at his most self indulgent extreme, which is not a good thing.

Badlands is great though.