"The Tree of Life" is better to say that it has a story, it is better to say that it borrows a story to express his mind. A family is established, a life is born, grows, and dies, it's that simple. Although some people have verified that Malik's younger brother committed suicide when he was young, which is the prototype of the dead brother in the film, the loss of family members is experienced by almost everyone, and there is no need to involve any real prototype, but can be viewed from a more intuitive perspective. Why did the director arrange such an "ordinary family". In the film, Malik brought his "idle pen" to the extreme, so that he could keep pace with the main line. From the birth of the universe, to the formation of the ocean, the birth of life, to the extinction of dinosaurs, such a natural history spans nearly 18 minutes, spanning a specific narrative. In later narratives, the chaotic imagery of the universe's birth will often appear, reminding the audience that the family that lost its son is at a point in the universe.
I guess that if Han Dynasty Confucian students who have been educated in contemporary natural history can see this film, they will definitely like it very much - it is a movie that is "inspired by heaven and man" - the family is a small universe, the birth and growth of life , demise compressed the evolutionary history of the universe, and even a dying dinosaur hinted at the death of its younger brother. The Neo-Confucianists in the Song Dynasty would probably also love this film. The macroscopic "principle" of the universe is reflected in the microscopic individual. Malik, on the other hand, placed this kind of video questioning in the style of "the poor and the green, and the yellow spring" under the framework of Christianity. So the ecstasy of those Christians is no less than that of Han Confucianism or Song Confucianism. This again shows that religious background is not very important for such a film. Your camera has been so free, and your images have broken through the rules of the predecessors. Why do you need to return to that warm embrace? Too bad Malik insisted on going back. He needs a self-contained system to make his logic impeccable, but this system brings "theoretical sublimation" as well as the artificiality of the characters. The characters have been "sensed by heaven and man", and they have also "the same principle of things". I thought to myself that Malik might agree with Cheng Yi's theory of "starving to death", he would rather damage his works than "reason".
Of course, some people say that its image is not very impressive, and it can even be regarded as a slightly magnificent MV. But I have never seen such a MV. The artistic expression of film is more subject to technological changes than other arts, which seems to have become a consensus, but the potential meaning of this sentence is: the expansion of artistic expression brought about by changes in film technology is not. It should stop at the intuitive feeling brought by technology. For example, after the emergence of sound technology, the proliferation of musical films does not really explain the magic of sound in movies. The cosmic scenes in "The Tree of Life" are all taken from the real cosmic scene observed by the Hubble Telescope. Although such documentaries have been published before, Malik's creative application of this is truly amazing. In my opinion, the image display of the cosmic space is not as objective as showing conventional objects on the earth, but a behavior that is more related to human self-knowledge, because to a certain extent, movies are also human beings' self-contemplation. Then the cosmic image has some kind of inner connection with the film itself. Malik's cosmology is the cosmology of our time, and there is nothing new about it, but his cosmic image has broken the monopoly of cosmic images in American science fiction films. Malik takes a small but splendid step in the relationship between cinema as what is shown and what is shown in particular—the universe.
Eisenstein once said that Das Kapital should be made into a film, and this vision has almost become the ultimate goal of "Essay Film" (that is, an argumentative film that relies entirely on montage). Now that Malik has brought high school natural history to the screen, with Bach's music, it couldn't be better.
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