Previous rumours of his extremely slow on-set shooting speed now seem to have little hold. His progress is not slow, as long as he finds the right light and angle (as in Days of Heaven, he only shoots in the twilight light, leaving the film shrouded in a mysterious light, but the daily shooting With only an hour, resulting in huge budget overruns), he can get a shot done in no time. What he is really slow is editing. Judging from several ready-made films, it is not difficult to see the difficulty of editing them - the "zero-degree editing" that can be produced by skilled Hollywood workers is gone without a trace, and even the space and time of the front and rear shots are connected. Logic has also become dispensable. Most of the shots are arranged according to the emotional direction of the characters or the music. The imagination required for this kind of editing is undoubtedly amazing. The traditional editing is like a step-by-step sweater, and Terrence Malik made all kinds of strange patterns from a wad of wool.
"To Wonderland" retains all the character of his films, but is more pure. There is also a vague story in "The Tree of Life", and only the emotion of "love" is left in "To Wonderland". An American man and a French woman went from passionate love to cohabitation, to mutual disgust and even breaking up (the general plot is like this, and the specific process is not explained or intended to be explained in the film). A story that can happen to anyone, and that anyone will find boring, is exactly the most common and cliché part of it that Malik wants to extract.
Since his return in 1998, all of his films have been filled with off-screen narration, sometimes narratively (as in The New World); In the recent "Tree of Life" and "To Wonderland", the narrations are more and more like the director's muttering, and it is difficult for the audience to make accurate connection between them and the movie scenes that appear at the same time - this is undoubtedly for the audience. A major offense - each of his films has a large audience who claim they don't understand it.
"To Wonderland" also has such an audience, and netizens criticized it as Malik's latest "pretend" work. But the recently deceased American film critic Roger Ebert said of the film: "Why does a film have to justify itself? Why does every motive have to be explained to people? Don't many films start from the same Is the movie, the same story remade?" This was his last film review before his death. In the last word-style questioning, the seriously ill Ebert did not intend to compromise with the audience who "can't understand". .
This illogical "Road to Wonderland" isn't about a love story, it's about "love" alone. The priest, played by Javier Bardem, said in his sermon: "There are two kinds of love, one is like a stream that dries up, from rushing to dries up, and the other is like a spring that never dries up." One is the love of mortals, and the other is the love of God." Does the mortal love we experience need to be justified? Isn't it just like those backlit shots facing the setting sun in the film, which are ignorant but breathtakingly beautiful?
It is rare that Terrence Malik still has a pure heart. His eyes were doing everything they could to search for those beautiful moments. We shared his search through the Steadicam system. He's been a loyal user of the Steadicam handheld camera system since it became popular, and the Steadicam does most of the shots in "To Wonderland," with smooth eye movements, over-the-shoulder crossings, and curved cameras. The movement all reminds the existence of the main body of the camera, which superimposes the director's perspective and blends the audience's vision through the screen, making watching this film a grand visual journey. This journey is more thrilling and memorable than any Hollywood VFX blockbuster.
Even compared to the previous work "The Tree of Life", it looks more rounded and lovely. The 18-minute history of the evolution of the universe in "The Tree of Life" makes what the whole film wants to express complicated and difficult to distinguish, but apart from the rest of this paragraph, isn't it very similar to "To Wonderland"? The life and death of a family, the life and death of a love; the same street scene, the same religious implication. "Leading to Wonderland" only weakens the religious element, it only governs love, and love that comes and goes.
Religion is a frequent element in Terrence Malik's films, and he himself has a strong Christian complex, which may be related to his family environment. His ancestors were Assyrians in the Middle East. Assyrians are one of the few Christian ethnic groups in the Middle East and have a small population. Before the 19th century, they were mainly distributed in Turkey and Iraq. At the end of the 19th century, Ottoman Turks persecuted Assyrians who believed in Christianity, forming a wave of Assyrians immigrating to the United States. Malik's grandfather immigrated to the United States at that time. As a nation that was once persecuted by religion, the importance of faith is self-evident to them.
I don't know if the fast pace of filming is good or bad for Malik. After all, his films don't win with story, and his gorgeous backlit moving shots will eventually run out of steam, even though they seem so fresh and soulful for now. Malik, of course, has changed, this time his lens is more focused on women, the female body is the absolute protagonist in the film, while Ben Affleck is a blurred, sluggish figure. This is not the same as the stark male image in previous films. If this is the director's intention, then we should hope that next time his camera finds more beautiful scenery and limbs.
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