If anyone takes his time making movies, it's Terrence Malick. Between 1973 and 2005, Malick only directed four films - Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005). Perhaps the care Malick takes with each of his films necessitates these long gaps, or maybe he just doesn't want to churn out 18 films a year like a conveyor belt. Whatever the reasoning for the slow pace, things seemed to have changed for him; he has more films in production in the last three years than in that entire first three-decade span. The film that one could argue was the starting point of this career-reinvention was 2011's The Tree of Life; a sprawling tale of life on our planet starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn...and two dinosaurs. Yes. Why, you may ask upon watching this film, are we treated to such an immensely long timeline, from the birth of the universe to the end of all things? And why do we pause in Waco, Texas, of all places? How are we supposed to read the dominance of one dinosaur over the other against a family drama in the 1950's? The Tree of Life is big in just about every way, and the questions that Malick raises still overflow from every careful shot.
