To+the+Wonder

­­Just like in The New World, To the Wonder is a romance drama between two characters. To the Wonder is a film that contains only a handful of important characters and a few crucial moments in their lives. Although it uses dialogue, it's dreamy and half-heard, and essentially this could be a silent film — silent, except for its mostly melancholy music. This is very similar to his film The Tree of Life. That is something very common in Terreance Malick's films. He focuses on narration of the characters so you can hear their thoughts, and there are several instances where he uses symbolism to paint a bigger picture.

1.a. In Days of Heaven, Look at the movie and the first thing you notice is that, from the very beginning, speech is diminished, de-emphasized -- drowned out in the opening scene by the roaring and pounding of the hellish factory. We don't know exactly what caused the flare-up between Bill and the mill foreman because the words they're saying have been all but eliminated. The next voice we hear, and the first we hear clearly, is narration -- spoken, as it turns out, by the girl, Linda who we've seen in the last photo of the opening title montage. Which includes many famous photographs from early 20th century America, with an emphasis on urban labor and poverty. 2.b. The story of "Days of Heaven," like the title, has biblical relation that suggest the Fall (not that migrant labor on a wheat farm is itself Edenic) and the serpent Cain and Able (though Bill and the farmer are not literally brothers, what happens between them is a form of fratricide), apocalyptic accounts of the Last Judgment (from a guy named Ding Dong, according to Linda's voiceover) and, of course, a plague of locust, among other biblical images and motifs. Terrence Malick makes many religious motifs in his movies. 3.c. Malick’s devotion to cinematic sight and sound is equaled by his commitment to the aesthetics of language. The Thin Red Line is about words as much as it’s about anything; more precisely, it’s about the intimate interconnection between word and image, which Malick explores in truly audacious ways, especially in the scenes with voice-overs. For example, the scene with the husband thinking of his wife back home. 4.d. An iconic moments from The Thin Red Line is the two-hour mark. A relatively minor character named Private Dale threatens a traumatized Japanese prisoner with brutal treatment. The captive, who doesn’t understand a thing Dale is saying, speaks a few soft words in Japanese, and in the background, Hans Zimmer’s magisterial score quotes the interrogative trumpet line of “The Unanswered Question,” the 1906 tone poem that composer Charles Ives described as a “cosmic landscape” echoing with the unanswerable question of existence. Malick is combining sound and picture to go against each other. 5.e. Malick's goal for The New World was "natural light, no cranes, no big rigs, handheld". In other words, barebones film-making. The second unit was despatched to gather beautiful and captivating visual picture, including breathtaking images of the film's two lovers before a real lightning storm at sundown, and ducks quacking their way though the magic-hour's golden light – while soundmen taped birdsongs, forest murmurs and the hiss and babble of water in motion. 6.f. In The New World, the movie ends on a bird skittering out of a tall tree in the edenic forest with a frrrrrp-sound of beating wings – fade to black. It shows the simple things Terrence Malick focuses on like he does in all of his films. 7.g. In The Tree of Life­, there is a series of shots that include nature and space, similar to the film 2001. It shows the creation of life, back form the very beginning. He does this without words, powerful images with strong musical component of opera singing. In Malick’s films he makes every shot count, every image a master piece.