LFF 2016 REVIEW - VOYAGE OF TIME: LIFE'S JOURNEY (TERRENCE MALICK)

The most specific movie yet from Terrence Malick, yet also the most universal. More than ever before, Voyage of Time: Life's Journey demands of its audience that it submits itself to the lulling vagaries of Malick's wandering thoughts, given form by this collage of stunning material in a baffling arrangement. The film intends to evoke pure emotions, those which make this filmmaker a most sensational fit for this medium - awe, fear, wonder, passion. It's a macro film with macro concerns, and micro ones too, the two unified in a marvellous artistic display. Malick binds vast, terrifying notions to more intimate, ephemeral concerns, marrying the nature of existence to the ways in which we choose to exploit it; grainy camcorder footage of various scenes of cultural expression and more harrowing content send a message that doesn't especially enrich Voyage of Time, and they pale in comparison to the visual majesty of the film's main body. Less focus than devotion is required to properly absorb the philosophical and sensorial detail amid these breathtaking images, and narration supplied by Cate Blanchett - solemn exclamations of confusion and despair. Just as it took Malick many years to bring Voyage of Time together, one considers that perhaps it may take as long to appreciate what value there is in this cumbersome text, although it is employed beautifully in the film's enticing opening. And much as we're navigating the fundaments of life, so too are Malick's verbal expressions reduced to their most basic form, all the better to settle oneself into the gloriously expansive yet inclusive, even personal inquiries made herein. Its missteps and mistakes are more pronounced than in other recent works by this legendary cinematic figure, but he continues to solidify that legend with some of the most entrancing cinema ever made.

LFF 2016 PREVIEW: VOYAGE OF TIME: LIFE'S JOURNEY

'An experience that I haven't been able to shake, like a waking dream'

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

'A rapturous work of telescopes and microscopes'

Fernando F. Croce, MUBI's Notebook

'The most maximalist work yet by Terrence Malick that never lets the audience lose sight of the big questions at its heart'
Michael Koresky, Film Comment

The maverick American auteur, disappearing ever deeper into the rabbit hole to produce ever more distancing, divisive, esoteric works of art with ever more frequency. Where do I sign? Terrence Malick may be too easy to dismiss these days, as the type of filmmaker who makes films only for his own satisfaction, but when they provide me with just as much satisfaction, who am I to dismiss him in the slightest? And indeed I do not - I'm chomping at the bit to see Voyage of Time: Life's Journey (remember, this is not Voyage of Time: An IMAX Experience, a different version of the same project) at the 2016 BFI London Film Festival, and I'm delighted to have booked a ticket to include it in SOS' official schedule this year. Set to be one of the most unique and memorable cinema experiences not only of the festival but of the year for me, I'm expecting big things from a filmmaker who's yet to let me down. Word is that, whether he does or not, big things are definitely on the menu in Voyage of Time!

VOYAGE OF TIME: LIFE'S JOURNEY - THEATRICAL TRAILER

Presenting the trailer for the full-length theatrical version of Terrence Malick's Voyage of Time, known as Voyage of Time: Life's Journey; remember that there's a separate IMAX version in addition, apparently comprising the same footage only considerably less - you can check out the trailer for that here. Competing in competition at Venice and also confirmed for a Special Presentation at Toronto. Out in the US on the 7th of October.

TRAILER FOR VOYAGE OF TIME: AN IMAX EXPERIENCE

As if to tease an older generation of cinephiles, Terrence Malick demonstrates his outrageous profligacy this decade with not one but two versions of his upcoming project, Voyage of Time. And, with last year's Knight of Cups only being seen by many audiences this year, between these two, reportedly rather different offerings, certain viewers may be treated to three Malick films in one year! Three! In one year! This from the man who took 20 years to make The Thin Red Line! Worth noting that the above trailer with narration by Brad Pitt is for the 40-minute version for IMAX, due to be released in the US on the 7th of October, while the 90-minute version with narration by Cate Blanchett is just for your nerves!

REVIEW - KNIGHT OF CUPS (TERRENCE MALICK)

Terrence Malick has apparently run out of new ideas. Fine. Nobody else makes movies like this. Nobody else works like he does. Why should he need new ideas? In Knight of Cups, the master repurposes his technical schematics in service of a story of spiritual dissatisfaction, a desolate disconnect with the real world that Malick treats with embittered apathy. What need for new ideas here, in an artificial town filled with artifice, not isolated by desert and sea but in brutish ignorance of them? Malick the recluse paints Los Angeles as a soulless space, the functional architecture more in tune with the money that made it than the materials, and everything dwarfed by the sky. There's little inspiration up there, or so these people seem to feel. Promise doesn't pay off in Knight of Cups - perversely, this hotbed of talent is where talent goes to wither away into gaucherie and irrelevance. Malick turns away from what is real, and from what is really worthwhile, and wallows in the lavish worthlessness of what he finds. Naturally, it's a technical masterclass - again, what need for new ideas, when the old ones are still so fresh, so idiosyncratic, so brilliantly employed - yet one senses an effort to mitigate the film's innate excellence with the sheer weight of its weightlessness. Knight of Cups is an intentionally difficult film, even necessarily difficult. It's thoroughly admirable, but questionably enjoyable. Does Malick regard his techniques as valid here as ever before, or does he see what we see: a genius suppressing his own genius, willfully assigning his latest film into obscurity? It'd be a fitting, and wholly believable, idea - a new idea, indeed.

REVIEW - THE REVENANT (ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ INARRITU)

The Revenant is a great film that needs so deeply to be a great film that it ultimately ends up rather far short of greatness. It's an emulation, an amalgamation, an artful pastiche of artistry that trips over itself trying. So much effort has been put into this film that one feels there's very little effort left for the audience, very little to latch onto and form our own personal, subjective connection with. Be Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's brushstrokes broad or fine (or even his own, an uncommon in his career), they're always much too clear to behold; how can a viewer feel engaged with what they're viewing when their synapses are being lit up not by themselves but by the hands of the filmmaker, no matter how masterful their touch? The Revenant is a collage, largely of the works of Terrence Malick, but it's a beautiful collage, full of dynamic sequences that ought to be more touching, more thrilling, more awe-inspiring than they are. It's marvellously physical and sensual - edited as though it were a series of desperate gasps and held breaths, the sound design a delicious symphony of squelches and guttural groans. But to what effect? Gonzalez Inarritu can't resist but draw one's attention to the technique on display, and while it's easy to comprehend why, it's not quite excusable. It also distracts from what is an essentially human story, though Leonardo DiCaprio's performance is equally calculated - a depiction of determination, with none of the soul nor purpose behind this outrageous true story evident in what he contributes. And the film's innate insensitivity is brought forth most clearly of all (tellingly, this is only clear if you're attuned to it, given the tired attempts at excusing it away) in The Revenant's treatment of its native characters - not so much in their story, but in its subordination to the story of yet another poor white man.