Malick’s mood-footnote to The Tree of Life sets visions of the dawn of the universe and mankind against a ludicrously solemn
Brad Pitt voiceover
Five years after it was first shown at the Venice film festival, Terrence Malick’s 45-minute docu-meditation about the dawn of time, nature and humankind finally gets a release in the
UK on streaming platform Mubi.
With its bold images of the natural world and occasional dinosaur-fantasy sequences, accompanied by a sonorous voiceover from Brad Pitt, this was always conceived by the director as a standalone project but is effectively a kind of adjunct or mood-footnote to his award-winning 2011 experimental epic The Tree of Life. That had many of the same preoccupations and imagery, but crucially a smaller-scale human component, the story of a 1950s
Texas family which gave the cosmic effusions a filmic immediacy and relevance.