Voyage of Time: Life's Journey

Ever since those glamorous space shots set against hypnotic opera music in The Tree of Life I’ve been impatiently waiting for this one.  That was seven and a half goddamn years ago.  But that’s nothing compared to what Terrence Malick’s been through.  Since the 70’s he’s been compiling nature footage, filming narrative parts with actors, constantly rewriting the script, crafting CGI creatures and developing methods to film chemical liquids at high speed.  And after all that painstaking work globetrotting, reworking story and narration, editing forty years worth of material, not to mention making other movies, the final result is…pretty not that great.

To be clear I saw the 90 min Life’s Journey version with the Cate Blanchett (The Lord of the Ringses) voice over.  I couldn’t get my hands on the shorter 40 min Brad Pitt (Allied) narrated version to compare which is too bad because I would’ve liked to have seen the differences.  Oh well.

Anyway, the documentary bits like a volcano erupting, weird ass sea life going about its weird ass business and all of that is stunning to behold.  Not only are the events fascinating to witness and give you a glimpse of the world beyond your TV but they’re also beautifully photographed.  At times everything can be so vibrant and awe-inspiring but at others subdued and even off-putting.  The varied mixture of images gives off an equally varied mixture of feelings.

Along with nature there are scenes of modern people from around the world except it’s very different from everything else.  It’s more like a home movie because it’s in standard definition, the camera is jittery and the people appear to be real and not actors.  They’re doing all sorts of stuff like celebrating in the street, holding a wedding, wandering, performing rituals, etc.  I’m not sure what Malick was going for with these sections which are sprinkled throughout.  I would understand more if it came at the end, like now humans are on earth and everything is still chaotic and strange but in a totally different way than before.  But inserting these vignettes every so often is puzzling.  It’s not nice to look at and seems to paint humans in not the most flattering light.

The space parts are fine but I think most of it is fake and some of it isn’t that attractive.  I’ll lump the couple of primeval animals in here too with that remark.  It’s silly looking shit that the movie didn’t necessarily need.

The score?  It’s kinda forgettable but that’s fitting because it’s there to support the visuals and not fight for your attention.

For me the best scenes are the ones with prehistoric man.  Supposedly this was filmed back in the 70’s but I don’t buy that.  It matches too well with the rest of the footage and is in the same style Malick has been using since The Tree of Life (everything before that, including The New World which immediately preceded it, had relatively more focused and restrained cinematography).  But this is the closest we get to any sort of story where we hang out with aboriginals hunting, gathering, traveling, laughing, fighting and marveling at the world around them.  It’s incredibly touching and I wish the entire film was about this.  It feels like real cavemen and not people in ape suits like in 2001 (as much as I adore that picture) or an action adventure expedition like Quest for Fire or some god awful trash like 10,000 BC.  It’s gorgeously elemental and really perfect for Malick because he’s big on pure emotion and down on dialogue anyway.  I wanted to see what our ancient ancestors were gonna do next but it’s such a small part of the movie and that’s extremely unfortunate.

I don’t think I can recommend this based on the early man parts alone.  Sure the nature stuff is cool too but the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be.  All life on earth isn’t portrayed in some manner either.  It’s mostly marine life so that’s off kilter as well.  Plus it’s impossible to get past the pretentious obnoxious Cate Blanchett narration where she cries out shit like “mother, what do I love when I love you?”  I guess it’s more of a free form film.

It’s tough.  I enjoyed parts of it and that makes me wonder if I might like the shorter version better.  Even though this is sort of an amorphous blob of a picture I’d still take it over Song to Song.