Throughout the whole movie I kept going back to the beginning, where the black bull walks around at night and in the end remains staring at the camera, face to face.
There is something curious about the approach of the movie to the length and the details of the bullfights. The first one is quite elaborate and long, and the most shocking of them all as it introduces the audience to the fight. The next few ones are shorter and…
Unbelievable how much visual poetry there is in such a clearly bleak and pessimistic movie. Feels like the poeticism was an awkward addition next to that bleakness, which makes the movie even more powerful.
There was something magical about how there was a lot going on and at the same time the movie tried not to linger on any of them. It was full of beautiful shots, but the fact that Malick only gave brief glimpses of them made them all the more dreamlike. And what elevated them from being just dreamy, beautiful shots was the way he kept this consistent in almost all the scenes throughout the movie, making the shots intertwined with…
Watching all the episodes back to back was such a devastating but also transcendental and transformative experience. The visual poetry and the loose narrative of each episode, and the movie as a whole, was absolutely immense. The sun, the mountains, the clouds, the moon, the dust, the legs, the boots, the shifting faces of soldiers next to all these… There were so many moments that I couldn’t help but take notes and pictures, yet there were many more that I…
