part 1 (on my phone, immediately after seeing it)

I want to write poetry and lay still and run fast and climb mountains and hold my children and laugh and growl and fight and breathe slowly and wander and sing and sleep and make love like a summer evening wind.

part 2 (just now, a few days later)

★★★★★
I’m gonna be real. Fuck cynicism. This film is art, and I found it to be profoundly beautiful on many levels. Malick is a master who does not play by any of the “rules” (of popular American cinema at least), and who truly has mastered a style that is unmistakably his own. Every shot—I think I can honestly say that without hyperbole—was photographically beautiful and loaded with imagery, story, and soul. Malick has a way of making a scene feel so real that it’s almost a bit uncomfortable at first. The marked lack of dialogue — the seeming lack of any sound at all for that matter — the camera angles, the pacing, the non-linear story-telling, the constant camera movement — it’s all classic Malick. And yet here it feels like he’s reaching a level of maturity in the way he does it that enables him to take chances and pull directorial rabbits out of his hat that honestly had me gasping at times. The soundtrack and sound design were astonishingly good. If they don’t win every conceivable award for sound, it will be a shame. The acting by all the main characters, especially the young boys, was pitch perfect throughout. In fact, it was so good that extra credit must be given to acclaimed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The fact that such realistic, honest, nuanced performances were achieved — in the way that they were achieved (I don’t think the camera was ever not moving throughout the entire film) — is a tribute to a true master. The abstractions, the nature scenes, the deep space scenes, the dream-sequence-like tone that is successfully carried without falter for 2 hours… it’s all incredibly surreal, incredibly subtle, and powerfully effective. And yet for all of its surreality, the relationships and emotions and imagery in it feel far more real than any non-documentary I’ve seen in recent memory. This is not for the popcorn-stuffing, event-movie Summer crowd. This is art. This belongs in an art museum. It is not going to just “make sense” for you if that’s what you want it to do. And it is nearly perfect because of it.

It may not be “accessible” to everyone. But frankly, if this film does not speak to you on some level, then you may be dead inside.

I left the theater feeling like I had just been truly surprised and delighted by a film. That does not happen very often.