SilentDawn’s review published on Letterboxd:
100
"Tell us a story from before we can remember."
An impression of many lives, countless lives, vast, immeasurable lives but centralized around the duration of just one human being. So much of Malick's ingenuity stems from the fact that no other movie, before or since, looks like this, and as much as Lubezki has tried to replicate the effect for other artists, it is the singular worldview which embodies its essence, capturing a startling, fierce way of seeing the world. It's all a miracle, riotous and energized, contemplative and searing. Ordinary aspects of life - trees, grass, cars, water - are seen in a new light, one of heavenly grace, vivid construction, and organic evocation. Have to say that as much as I adore (ie: tears in my eyes for the entire section) the impressionistic turbulence and force of the first hour, its settlement into specificity is astonishing. It is through Young Jack that I find clarity in Malick's boundless canvas, as the "importance" of his day-to-day existence is tightly wound against the cold infinity of the cosmos. I do not see an existentialist angle, but one which acknowledges every mystery and decides to embrace a particular dream induced through religion and the towering struggles of faith. Final twenty-minutes is a still a non-stop tearjerker in how it connects gargantuan science with specific faiths, and the catharsis found in its tremendous spaces of an afterlife is the final closing imprint on what is possibly the finest motion picture ever created. There may be no other world than ours, but who we have and what we are is a light of its own, flickering from the dark, shimmering into the core of our embraces.