12 Movies That Tried Too Hard To Innovate (And Sucked Anyway)

12. The Tree Of Life

Terrence Malick, as reaffirmed by his successful recent film A Hidden Life, is a very gifted filmmaker but he does have a tendency to get a bit carried away with his ambitious projects. The Tree of Life was perhaps the peak of this.

A movie so pretentious and self-indulgent it frequently feels like a parody of pretentious, indulgent art-house films, this combination of bewildering creation montages, irritating surrealism, endless voice-overs and even CGI dinosaurs at one point is just too much on every conceivable level. It's so abstract and bizarre that its themes are rendered far too hard to decipher, so The Tree of Life pretty much shoots itself in the foot.

The main narrative core of the film is a family drama set in the 1950s and this does have some good moments. Malick is actually good at telling intimate human stories (as films like Badlands and A Hidden Life prove) so he should've just focused on that and dialled down on all the distracting weirdness that filled the rest of the movie.