Critics reviews

As artistic acts go, it's colossally hubristic. The culmination of years of filming and decades of preparation, Voyage of Time attempts to cinematically represent no less than the history of existence. From the big bang to suburban sprawl, from the evolution of the species to the devolution of the recorded image, Malick's first work of nonfiction doesn't lack for ambition, pursuing perhaps the biggest and unruliest whale of all.

Terrence Malick's experimental natural science essay, Voyage of Time: Life's Journey, offers thorny yet challenging questions of religions galore in an ultra-condensed fashion. Call it Inside The Tree of Life. The film delivers some perspective on the human drama in all its divine vastness, ranging from sweeping shots of meadows to animated dinosaurs dying on a beach.

It has some of the strangest juxtapositions he's ever attempted, evidenced by a move from the high-def-rendered, meteoric demise of the dinosaurs to lo-fi digital of the Arab Spring. It also has more footage of fish and undersea life than it does the kinds of interstellar sequences that galvanized his monumental The Tree of Life, which helps make this feel less like a self-serious, definitive story of our origin and more an idiosyncratic curiosity keyed to Malick's own mysterious interests.

For all its wordless abstraction, Malick's film, a 90-minute extrapolation of the 20-minute creation-of-the-world sequence from The Tree of Life, is in a way his most cleanly linear film, moving inexorably from galactic pools of light and primordial gas cloud formations to splitting amoebas, underwater creatures, and galumphing dinosaurs.

Not every line rhymes, and some privilege sound over sense — anyone who's dismissed his recent work as woo-woo posturing will have much to pounce on here. But as the filmmaker retreats further into cinematic territory where only his most ardent devotees are likely to follow, he has also hit on the kind of sentiments that make you feel as though the universe is reaching out for a cosmic embrace.

Even as Malick has become more prolific over the years, he remains as much the eternal seeker, questioning our place in the world even as he remains as committed as ever to a belief in a higher consciousness. Voyage of Time is perhaps his most direct expression of these long-running threads, a skeleton key of sorts in which he lays bare the spiritual striving that has always underpinned his work.

It's a rapturous work of telescopes and microscopes. The scope is cosmic as well as infinitesimal, as befits a film that ruminates on the very formation of life and nature, beginning with semi-abstract orbs that could be shimmering stars or inflamed ova. Blending natural footage with computer-rendered effects, Malick envisions the shape-shifting universe as a most lavish planetarium light-show.

Painful as it may be, it's best to recall the opening 20 minutes of The Tree of Life (2011), with its images of the cosmic universe and dinosaurs combined with hushed Rod McKuenesque verse, to grasp the nature of Voyage of Time. It's more or less the 20 minutes with 70 additional minutes, including some roughly shot video footage of homeless people, drug addicts, and Indian Hindu rites. Plus, for want of a better term, a comic interlude, the single silliest thing Malick has ever staged...

Watchers of recent Terrence Malick films will recognise the slow-drip voiceover style here, as read with mild plaintiveness by Cate Blanchett: sententious and banal, seemingly designed to rival scripture but nowhere near up to the comparison as writing, as expression of emotion. It is also so pompous that it's wide open to satire.

The film contains numerous moments of profound beauty, such as early humans coating themselves in muddy handprints the craggy and uneven hills of lava-formed surfaces overgrown with grass. By prioritizing time as the active narrative agent, the director further emphasizes the objective beauty of the image, tacitly acknowledging that his fussy editing can only suggest meanings to that which will outlive anyone's interpretation.

It's a sort of vast and visually overwhelming nature documentary, albeit with brief acted sequences, and, as such, it's an easy film to parody and to mock... But that's true of any intensely serious work of art. "Voyage of Time" inhabits a rarefied plane of thought, detached from the practicalities of daily life, that leave it open to a facile and utterly unjustified dismissal, given the breathtaking intensity of its stylistic unity and the immediate, firsthand force of its philosophical reflections.

Four films into this more esoteric phase of his career, his manner of wide-eyed rhetorical inquiry is beginning to feel obtusely banal. Admittedly, there's no one you'd rather hear intone this hokum than Blanchett, whose grave, creamy voice almost makes the text seem worthy of the visuals it accompanies. (Brad Pitt, meanwhile, will narrate the film's shorter, Imax-fitted edit.) Malick's ear for aural splendour is as keen as his eye: it's the words that get in the way.