It definitely tests your patience, but it's ambitious on a scale that most directors are afraid to even attempt and if you're willing to go with it as an experience it yields significant rewards. It wasn't the most purely enjoyable movie I saw this year, nor was it my favorite movie of the year, simply because it had too many passages that were a bit of a slog to get through. But it was the movie this year that I thought about the most and challenged me the most in terms of the way I think about what a film is and how it can be conceived and constructed. And in the end, it impacted me emotionally the way few films ever do. I walked out of it wanting to reconsider how I approach my relationships with people, and felt as if I'd never be able to look at things in nature again without considering their place in the creation of all things and the grandiosity of what has come before. The way Malick captures the world and images of nature for some reason just really made me contemplate the divinity behind their existence. For me having this reaction to a film is something much more rare than simply being entertained, and I wish I could always carry with me the desire for change I felt walking out of that theater. It just made me want to appreciate things that I often fail to consider in the world around me.
