Now that I’ve seen Badlands I’ve taken in every Terrence Malick film other than The New World. And now that I’ve seen Badlands I’m one step closer to saying that the only Terrence Malick movie I like is Days of Heaven. While everything the man has shot has been gorgeous to look at, I’ve found most of what he’s done to also be boring, pretentious, and full of far too on-the-nose visual metaphor. His films are what it would be like if a virtuoso photographer’s portfolio and a teenage girl’s high school poetry had a baby. Here, despite the fact that this movie is packed full of shootouts and chases, I once again found Malick’s plotting to be slow and plodding. A young couple commits a murder, goes on the run, and then that’s pretty much it. And once again, I find his characters to be one dimensional to the point of feeling alien. Martin Sheen’s Kit is so thoughtless and without morality that he’s completely unrelatable as a protagonist, and Sissy Spacek’s Holly is so passive and naive that she might as well be a department store mannequin along for the ride. Not to mention the fact that her voice over narration is clunky and unnecessary. I guess at this point in his career Malick was afraid to bore us with silence; at least he got over that fear. Certainly there must be something in this man’s films that I don’t see for so many people to love them so dearly, but it’s something that remains invisible to me nonetheless. Malick is a man who I’d hire to fill an art gallery with photography, sure, but he’s not somebody I’d ever put in charge of telling a story.
