Terrence Malick's Toronto Double Feature: 'Voyage of Time: Life's Journey' and 'Voyage of Time: The Imax Experience'
In 2016, Terrence Malick went from being a director who made one film every two decades to a director who made two films in one year. And make no mistake: These two new movies — Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey and Voyage of Time: The Imax Experience, both of which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this week — stand apart from each other as distinct productions, despite sharing a main title and a common ancestor, a once abandoned project called Q that Malick originally intended to make in the 1970s, before his 20-year sabbatical from filmmaking.
Rumored to be a film that would explore the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything, elements of Q were later integrated into the director’s 2011 triumph, The Tree of Life. That film first paired Malick with special-effects pioneer Douglas Trumball, who made the galaxy come alive for Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey and designed the impressive interstellar backdrops glimpsed in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Trumball was instrumental in designing the effects for the “Origin of the Species” sequence that takes place early on in The Tree of Life, a bravura 15-minute set piece that spans the Big Bang to the 1950s when the bulk of the film takes place.
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While digital effects were employed for that scene — most notably (and, for some, distractingly) with the fleeting appearance of some CGI dinosaurs — much of it drew on Trumball’s preferred methods of model work and using high-speed cameras to photograph water tanks filled with colorful dyes. As he told The New York Times in 2012: “We wanted to find ways to replicate what nature does normally [and] we tried to do it in a way that was in keeping with what you see in real space photographs.”
The earliest rumors of Voyage of Time began to circulate during the lengthy production and post-production of The Tree of Life, suggesting that Malick felt inspired enough by Trumball’s work to take another crack at a new version of Q. From the beginning, the project was announced as two separate features: one for Imax screens and one for traditional theaters. The longer cut, Life’s Journey, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival prior to Toronto, where it received a decidedly mixed response. To be certain, it’s a more traditional Terrence Malick movie, right down to the resplendent nature photography we’ve come to expect from the director of Days of Heaven and The New World, as well as the wisps of narration provided by Cate Blanchett, which address the same universal “Mother” that so many of Malick’s narrators are heard murmuring to.
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But Life’s Journey is unique among the director’s increasingly divisive films in that, for the first time, there are no famous actors (or unexpected celebrity guest stars, who are sometimes as befuddled to be there as the audience is to see them) in the frame, playing out all-too-human dramas against the backdrop of the natural world. That frees Malick up to turn his attention entirely to the wonder — and violence — he sees in Earth’s environment, ruminating on how a world filled with so much beauty is also inevitably accompanied by suffering.
Skimming back and forth across millennia, Life’s Journey juxtaposes manufactured images of creation and evolution with resplendent location shots of natural and urban beauty, as well as moments of destruction. Grainy video footage of humans watching cattle being slaughtered is later contrasted with nature documentary-ready images of a seal chowing down on a poor fish, tearing it apart piece by piece while gulls hover above the water waiting for the leftovers. The film makes it clear that all of this — the beauty, the pain, and the constant yearning for understanding — is part of…well, life’s journey.
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Where the feature film version of Voyage of Time asks questions of a mother, the IMAX version (which had its world premiere in Toronto, and opens in theaters on Oct. 7) is framed as a teachable lesson to a child. That’s made explicit in a pre-film note that informs young viewers in only slightly condescending language that they’re about to watch a film about the origins of the universe and their place in it. Very clearly pitched at the museum market — where IMAX screens prize educational content over philosophical musings — The IMAX Experience presents the linear version of Malick’s voyage across the eons, with Brad Pitt’s gentle voice serving as tour guide. Pitt gets much more to say than Blanchett, and most of his lines are explanatory rather than impressionistic, further pointing to The IMAX Experience’s eventual home as a Smithsonian staple.
It’s no surprise that the main attraction in this cut is seeing Malick’s spectacular eye for nature — assisted immeasurably by cinematographer Paul Atkins, who specializes in more traditional nature documentaries — blown up to IMAX size. Some of the images that are merely impressive in Life’s Journey are downright immersive in The IMAX Experience, to the point where if you lean forward, you almost worry that you might fall into the mouth of an active Icelandic volcano or sink below the waves of a deep, dark ocean. Both of Malick’s years-in-the-making Voyages are well worth taking: the choice you have to make is whether you want to take the journey with IMAX-enabled signposts or chart your own path through his larger-than-life creation story.
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