Review of To the Wonder (2013) by Eero V — 28 Sep 2014

Perhaps no other filmmaker has repeated himself as wearily in recent years as Terrence Malick. His last truly great film was The Thin Red Line from 1998; since then, he disappointed heavily with The New World, showed signs of improvement with the ambitious (but meandering and overrated) Tree of Life, but now he has really bottomed out.

To the Wonder is an arduous snooze-fest that features the typically stunning imagery, but ponders the exactly same philosophical and metaphysical issues that Malick has depleted many times before. The abstractness and lack of story, character development and dialogue are usually the things that anger many about his films, but To the Wonder exasperates just because it doesn't offer the audience anything that Malick wouldn't have offered before.

We've seen the images of underwater life. We've seen the images of women dancing on the fields with their arms open. We've seen the images of children playing. "What does it all mean?" is the quintessential question of Malick's films, but here you don't think about it, because you don't care.

Malick doesn't spoon-feed the audience and encourages us to think and draw our own conclusions, which is respectable, but where filmmakers like Kubrick did, and Cronenberg, von Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson still do, manage to tell a story or at least create interesting characters while offering small clues about what could be the meaning of the story, Malick merely wallows in artsiness and stagnation, and his efforts at ambiguous symbolism feel compulsive and smug.

There are allegedly biographical elements in both The Tree of Life and this, so it appears he makes movies about himself, for himself. Based on the content of the films, he seems like a meditative and sensitive, but not a very interesting guy.

To the Wonder is a punishing endurance test. You'll be checking the time after 10 minutes.