I guess a lot of the reason a lot of people didn't like the movie came from confusion about how it was narrated (shot). Terrence Malick is no doubt a director of pretense, but he did it quite well this time. If you keep watching the whole movie, you will eventually discover its close relationship with religion. After generalizing the theme of religion, it is actually showing the relationship between the creator and the created. This presentation is blocked by the prose and poetic jumping plot, but many of the upside-down shots and the imagery of facing the sun, caves, and doors are clearly intended, and the voiceover is even more straightforward. From God and Lamb, parent and child, universe and microbes, life and death to magma and sea, sky and earth, brother and brother, Terrence Malick has dissolved God. He acknowledges that there is a creator, but the creator becomes nothing at the end of the film. On the contrary, the pure human emotion of "love" is finally filtered. In the prophet-like pictures and holy songs, "The Tree of Life" sings the magic of life itself in another extreme way. It informs the world that the life-sustaining The Force does not come from faith or God himself, God may have created everything, but there is something more powerful than God who survives it all and learns to think.
Jumping out of the movie itself, if God is a programmer or an actuary, then the behavior of human beings to doubt God is also preset. This is a kind of "Godism" that can be extended indefinitely. The Tree of Life may have been a question with no answer, but sitting in class and raising your hand is respectable enough in itself.
February 8, 2012
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The Tree of Life reviews