An average movie

Even though this movie didn’t get much love when it was released, since I have always been interested in Terrence Malick's work, I was still eager to check it out. Well, unfortunately, it turned out to be a major disappointment. Indeed, after ‘To the Wonder’ which already barely worked, it seems that Malick finally really lost me here. Basically, once again, he gave us his typical impressionist directing style which is equally mesmerizing and frustrating, at least in my case and, even though you might think that there was no plot, there were in fact 3 plot-lines or threads. First, it seemed that the movie was about a movie writer struggling with his work in Hollywood and I have the feeling that it was supposed to be the main focus in this movie but Malick, I assumed, got bored, pretty much dropped this idea so it was barely developed at all. Then, you had some family issue between the main character, his brother, his father and a deceased brother. It was pretty obvious that this time Malick was recycling some material from ‘The Tree of Life’ and even though it worked better than the movie business stuff, the improvement was only minor. Then,  the biggest chunk of the movie was about the main character struggling with his love life and, this time, it felt really reminiscent to ‘To the Wonder’. However, if ‘To the Wonder’ was mostly focusing on the relationship between Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko, in this movie, the main character had some various romances with 6 different women which was just way too much. Basically, you would get Christian Bale wandering around for about 20 mins with one girl and then he would switch to another girl for 20 mins and so on and so on… As a result, you never had the opportunity to invest yourself in one of these relationships with such a short time and the fact that there was barely any dialogue and mostly some voice-overs didn’t help either. At least, as  usual with this director, the cinematography was just gorgeous (with 3 times Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, it was to be expected).  Then, there was a really impressive cast and it was pretty obvious that the actors greatly enjoyed the freedom provided by Malick’s directing style. To conclude, in spite of its flaws, I can’t completely dismiss the whole thing, I still think it is worth a look, even if it was seriously disappointing.