The Pretension Sweepstakes have a winner!
Are Terrence Malick films edited? IMDb lists the editors of The Tree of Life as Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber & Mark Yoshikawa (it took five guys to mis-edit this film), which sound like human names, but that has to be a mistake because anybody with a human brain would have removed at least an hour from this tedious, meandering, pretentious and mirthless exploration of God’s existence. Personally, I think that’s a smokescreen; I’m guessing Tree of Life (run time 139 minutes, but it will feel like an entire weekend) was really edited by Ennuibot3000, the latest in human snooze enhancers. Sorry for the ad.
Lacking for plot, containing hundreds of extended nature/cosmos/sub-cosmos shots and having long bouts of continuity issues, Tree of Life actually feels less like a summer escape and more 
like the planet Earth took some home movies and is making us sit through them for no particular reason, “and here’s me during the Pleistocene, and here’s some dinosaurs I met, and here’s this awful family where the dad (Brad Pitt) is a combination Job and The Great Santini … Hey, where are you going?”
And Terrence Malick was the hit at Cannes. Yikes. After seeing The Thin Red Line, The New World and this arboreal canine, I wouldn’t let Terrence Malick narrate a Bugs Bunny cartoon. We’d end up with shots of Elmer Fudd mumbling about life and staring at plants and sky while Daffy Duck doubted his own existence. It takes two full hours to get to the clichéd message of Tree of Life. It comes in voiceover so we wouldn’t miss it: “to live is to love; all the rest is bullshit.” There. I just saved you 2 ½ hours of life. Spend them wisely. Go love and stuff.
Rated PG-13, 139 Minutes
D: Terrence Malick
W: Terrence Malick
Genre: Film people pretend to enjoy to hide the fact they didn’t understand it
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Poseurs.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Everybody else.
Don’t miss my Open letter to the fans of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
