Floundering in the editing room since 2011 or thereabouts, Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time was first envisioned in the late ’70s as a project called Q, a naturalist epic about the beginnings of life on earth. Portions of it turned up in The Tree Of Life, but now (after a July 2013 lawsuit filed by Seven Seas, claiming that nearly $6 million in production funds had been more or less pissed away on nothing) Voyage has finally been completed and will open as two films — a 40-minute IMAX version narrated by Brad Pitt, and a 35mm feature-length version narrated by Cate Blanchett.
No offense but I’ll take the Pitt and shine the Blanchett.
The Voyage kin will open on 10.7.16 but really, nobody cares. Nobody except critics and the cloistered film-society monks who’ve taken it upon themselves to guard the Malick flame. VFX by Dan Glass and Douglas Trumbull, music by Ennio Morricone…flatline. If Voyage had popped 15 or 20 years ago it might have seemed like something, but it’s arriving in the midst of The Great Malick Rejection and is therefore a wildebeest calf facing wild dogs.
Nobody will give a damn about Weightless either. Critics will see it, of course, and take it for a spin around the dance floor but not a bird will stir in the trees. Unless, of course, Malick has reinvented himself with Weightless but what are the odds of that? Barring a miracle the man is over. The current incarnation, I mean. He could always go out to the desert and meditate for six months and return a changed man. Anything is possible. I’m sorry but he did this to himself.
