To the Wonder

To the Wonder is a bold and artistically ambitious piece of filmmaking, which is more than can be said of most films, but it's ultimately a failure.

Malick's film is concerned with themes of love and religion. The director has clearly made a very personal film: he met his second wife in Paris, and the couple lived in Oklahoma before eventually separating.

To the Wonder is unusual in that it contains very little dialogue, which creates an almost dreamlike quality. None of the characters are properly developed, though, and the result is an emotionally unsatisfying experience. Ben Affleck is given little to do other than stare pensively into the distance. Olga Kurylenko spends most of the film twirling. Javier Bardem's Father Quintana feels detached from the rest of the story and Rachel McAdams has little more than an extended cameo.

Certainly the film's strong point is Emmanuel Lubezki's stunning cinematography. Even the biggest detractors of To the Wonder would have to concede that it's a beautiful film.

At its best, To the Wonder evokes the greatness of Malick's previous film, The Tree of Life - but that film had characters you could connect with, so it worked on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one. At its worst, To the Wonder is dull and repetitious. It ends up feeling like a parody of a Malick film, with its self-importance and constant waxing poetic. There's too much style and not enough substance.

I am a huge Terrence Malick fan and have loved everything he has done, up until this. This is not a good film. It's drawn out, has a very uninteresting script, and just fails to entertain, stimulate, or do anything really.

It's a two hour wide angle shot of Ben Affleck being in a shitty relationship. Hmm...

That being said, the camera work is pretty great, as is the case with most of Malick's work, but that's pretty much it. There is almost no story to speak of, to even remember as I write this review. The French woman could have gone back home at any time and spared everyone the pain of their crappy relationship. Instead, she decides to draw out what everyone knows is a doomed scenario.

Malick should honestly have retired with the Tree of Life. It was excellent, and utilized the dreamy, wide-angle drawn out sequences very well, unlike here, where they are relied on to make up for a lack of substance.

I don't really recommend this film to anyone. If you are a Malick fan, it will severely diminish your appreciation for him, as it is as pretentious as it is boring.

If you enjoy seeing a lot of twirling, this is a movie you don't want to miss. The two female leads twirl wherever they are, grocery shopping, walking anywhere, not just on the beach but in grocery stores on casual strolls; and they never get dizzy. These women are every man's dream, Rachael McAdams wears makeup: lipstick, mascara, eyeliner-the whole nine yards, while she's bailing hay. It's amazing. To add to the enjoyment, there's no real plot. At least one you haven't seen before, albeit without the twirling. Olga Kurylenkoand and Ben Afflack never age because, I guess, they walk on the beach a lot while twirling. But eventually, all that twirling gets to them and he gets bored with her and then she gets bored with him and a priest gets bored with god and finally, the viewer gets dizzy watching.

This movie tries so hard to be beautiful, it hurts. I got a beauty overdose after 20 minutes. The cinematography is so gorgeous, it should be used to teach photography students, especially ultra-wide lens work. There is a lot of beautiful acting by insanely beautiful Olga Kurylenko and then some by beautiful Rachel McAdams, whose character is absolutely unnecessary, by the way. Not much more in terms of acting, though. Even the great Javier Bardem was acting Ben Affleck style - making serious faces and trying not to look stupid. Both extremely beautiful, of course. The score was quite beautiful, too. Other than all that beauty, there was nothing. No plot, no dialogues. Scattered pseudo-spiritual monologues in five languages did not help much, and reading meaningless subtitles distracted me from watching the aforementioned beauty. Bottom line: way too much beauty and zero content. Recommended to aspiring photographers and very patient Olga Kurylenko fans.

This film is about a man's turbulent relationship with a French woman, complicated by a childhood sweetheart he re-acquaints.

"To The Wonder" is a slow moving film with somewhat a plot, but not one that I understand. It tells how Neil meets Marina in France, then they move to the States. Marina is unhappy there and moves back to France. Somehow Marina moves back to the States to rekindle the relationship. That's what I got from the film, but the scenes are too random to really understand what is happening. There is a scene of Marina attempting overdose, then the next scene shows Marina kissing Neil's feet. Now just what exactly is happening? Even Rachel McAdams, the queen of romantic films, could not save this randomness. Her saccharine persona is truncated by scenes of crop fields and animals grazing. Actually, those romantic scenes of them frolicking in the fields concentrates more on the crops and animals.

"To The Wonder" is surely more accessible than "The Tree of Life", but it is still not so accessible to the general public.