The Tree of Life - a short review

I'm searching for how I feel in this moment - peaceful, grounded, reflective? I've just seen The Tree of Life (Terrence Malik, 2011) one of the most stunningly beautiful films I've ever seen in my life. The first ten minutes or so (maybe longer) is saturated with images that you think you've seen, but have probably never seen in nature documentary - the Earth seen from space, an eclipse, volcanoes erupting, red lava flowing, billowing ash in the sky, an explosion on the surface of the sun, microscopic views of blood rushing through veins, cells multiplying, tiny droplets of water, immense mountains, cavernous cliffs and their textured surfaces, and so many other images of the exquisite beauty of natural forces, including filtered and illuminating light that it becomes over-powering to the point that I almost cried. These images are combined with music that is so uplifting that you feel carried away to another world, a world that is ours and yet seen in this manner appears frightening, daunting and awe-inspiring in ways never imagined. This film is about nature sublime, the evolution of ourselves and the world in sound and image, but it's more a symphony than a narrative. Indeed the film rolls out in a series of movements that are like passages from classical music. There’s more than a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – the magnificence of space juxtaposed with masterful strains. Having said this, the film moves quickly from splendid nature to inspiring scenes of glass sentinels that grace city skylines, and it is here that Malik employs the same attention to detail of these man-made structures that he applied to the filming of environments created by the organic world. I felt that he was not so much making a comparison between built environments and those untouched by human intervention as he was in making a point about the similarities between the two. Often he'd use a panning up device to lead our eye from the bottom point of a tree to its furthermost point in the sky, or from the ground of a building as it also pointed up towards the heavens. Only a poet could have made this film. The direction mirrors the exactitude of Malik's eye for in each scene there are close up views, a child's hand gestures, blades of grass, a butterfly, the edge of a car. Each minute part of life magnified in a brilliance to elevate the senses. Of course there an event in the film that permeates the whole beautiful structure. It is about life and death, the struggle to come to terms with our origins and how they continue to affect us throughout our very being. Mother. Father. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will!