The Tree of Life (2011)
This seems like a type of film people either deeply connect with or completely drop out off. I was in the later group. I mostly liked Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, whereas this was completely dead to me. Terrence Malick has a flair for beautiful visuals, which is also present here, but better applied in the other two.
Ambitions sure are high here with philosophical musings about the meaning of life and the cosmos, but this is no 2001 or Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I respond better to character driven films and here the actors feel very distant and impersonal. There are just there and not very engaging to follow. It is set up as a mans loose memories and musings of his childhood, which makes for an unstructured narrative - which could be fine, but the potential for a personal story gets lost in the self-absorbing whispered musings of nothing and everything.
Rating: 2