Anyone who calls this film visually impressive needs to study science.

Wonder what the OP will be up to next. Will we hear of an axe murder committed by a frothing mad scientist carrying a laptop and a telescope?



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

"A dismal, dismal film, perhaps the WORST ever I've watched in my life."

Really? You mean it's worst than Van Helsing(2004)? Worst than Battlefield Earth(2000)? Worst than Battleship(2012)? Worst than Resident Evil movies too?:D
If this movie is worst you ever seen it's either you haven't seen many films or you write reviews poorly. Of course you could be a troll too..

Did it ever occur to you that those visuals were actually created by the cinematographer? Cinematography in EVERY SINGLE MOVIE, ALL THE TIME is imagery of the natural world which was created by god. The only imagery that can be commended based on your way of thinking would be VISUAL EFFECTS. Total computer generated imagery from a design by someone or multiple people. Yes the visuals were primarily science, but it's not like someone just took a photo of it and planted it in the movie randomly. They worked on it very hard to produce the image you see. You obviously just don't get it.

"I could make a movie about weirdos, some kids running around in the grass, and oh yea, include images from Hubble, WISE, SOHO, Spitzer, Chandra, Kepler and whatever space telescopes I can get my hands on. That's it. Done. Movie finished. Goodbye."



You know next to nothing about anything. Goodbye.


May the bridges we burn only light our way

Well, you can't actually study science, since science is knowledge, but knowledge doesn't affect the impact of its images.

Malick used images of existing nebulae because it would be rather silly to dream up hypothetical ones. but those shots only take up half a minute. Further, Malick never used the term 'beautify'; you did, so you can lose the quote marks. His crew As for the other astronomical and preastronomical images, Malick never designs things straight from his own imagination; he and his crew experimented with a variety of chemical and optical elements, supervised by a team of scientists for accuracy, and used what worked well. The images are necessary because they communicate that the known universe is coming into being. That entire passage, though, is only fifteen minutes out of a two-hour and ten-minute film.

Rotten Tomatoes does not have any critics of its own. Rotten tomatoes is one site that aggregates critic reviews.

Malick is enormously familiar with documentaries of the Discovery channel, among many other sources. One of his collaborators reported that he'd seemingly collected every natural history documentary ever made, and the two of them spent many hours looking at them, Malick pointing out what he liked best and why.

You can't name every scene in the movie because almost none of them have names and only seven to ten of the shots in the movie were not filmed by Malick's crew.

Nothing about the kids is weird. There is one shot of them rolling through grass and several hundred others of them doing other things. I'm sure you noticed the film has an awful lot going on: It's the story of a suburban family in the 1950s, the story of childhood and the end of childhood, of innocence and the loss of innocence, of kindness and unkindness, of love and death, of the establishment of the planet Earth and the life that inhabits it, of the search for meaning and the voice of God, of a mother, a father, a brother, and of the wonder of existence.

There is, in fact, quite a lot of dialogue in the film, as you will have noticed.

You might have to consider the possibility that Malick knows quite a lot about the Hubble images. You, in contrast, haven't gone to the trouble even of looking up the man's last name to see if you're spelling it right, let alone learn how the 'World we Live in' series influenced Malick from childhood and would ultimately lead to both the brief astronomic sequence in 'The Tree of Life' and his entire soon-to-be-released film 'Voyage of Time'.

The Hubble shots were not thrown in as-is, as you can read here: http://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/August2011/TheTreeofLife/page4.php

Several people involved with Hubble were reportedly delighted to see the images put in such a context and, for the record, I myself find the sequence to be the most powerful and moving lyrical passage I've ever seen by a country mile.

Directly addressing Malick in a user review on I.M.D.B. is a terribly silly thing to do, as he's famous for staying well clear even of film forums and the public eye, not least to avoid encounters with deranged people such as yourself.

'Wastage', I may point out, is not a word, nor is 'awe' a descriptor.

The movie grossed $54,303,319 at the box office, a gain of well over $22,000,000 past the film's budget.

One last thing I might make light of: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/the-greatest-films-of-all-time

I would disagree with you.

Three points that I feel that I have to make:

1. I certainly found the film visually stunning
2. I know science. Not all of it, but a heck of a lot of it
3. I didn't like the film at all

The first two points I believe are valid, I can appreciate images and still know the science. In fact it was the visuals that kept me going through the film and, like yourself I was playing Guess The Source of the various clips and even ticking off some 70s footage of the birth of Surtsey.

But, for me, that was all that the film had to offer. Yes, I got the 'story', theme or whatever in a short time and was waiting for the thing to end. Yes it was pretentious and self indulgent, but what's wrong with that?

I simply didn't like the film but to say that one must be ignorant of science if one liked the images is a little harsh.

Securejames, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this board is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

See what I did there? That is a quote from the movie "Billy Madison". I used something that someone else has created in order to enhance my own response and to further my point. This is common practice in journalism, literature as well as film.

This is what Terrence Malick has done here. He is using images, created by someone else, alongside his own images in order to create his film.

Your criticism of Mr. Malick for his use of this common technique can be likened to criticizing the makers of a JFK Assassination documentary because they themselves were not there to film it.

As a filmmaker myself, I can tell you that it is very common for filmmakers to use previously-created images in a new work (with the proper license of course) to enhance the new work. This is done either for budgetary reasons, reasons of aestheticism or lack of resources to re-shoot such a scene.

Just food for thought.

I hated The Tree of Life overall, but I thought that one thing that was very good about it was the cinematography outside of the suburbia scenes, which is what you're talking about above. I would say that stuff was visually impressive, but guess what? (a) Saying it's visually impressive has absolutely nothing with saying anything about the images scientifically, and (b) Saying that it's visually impressive in no way implies that all of the visually impressive stuff is original work or not similar to anything else, like the Planet Earth series. It's just saying that visually, it's impressive, whatever the source of the images, and whatever else they might bear a resemblance to, filmwise (and insofar as there's a resemblance, those other things are visually impressive, too).