Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience

How do you condense the story of the universe into just 45 minutes? Well, you need:

• Poetic and vague voiceover narration from Brad Pitt
• Beautiful images
• A keen ear for music to match to said images, and
• To be Terrence Malick

I think this mostly works. It really does aim to encompass as much as it can in less than an hour, all with the patient pacing most Malick films have. It makes for an interesting experience. Sometimes, it feels a little too abstract, but other moments are quite powerful.

Still, it feels like a companion piece to Tree of Life, and almost like an extended version of that film's birth of the universe sequence. I don't think it's nearly as powerful as that sequence in that film, but it scratches a similar itch. Parts near the end reminded me a little of Koyaanisqatsi, too. It's also not nearly as good an exploration of Planet Earth and its inhabitants as that iconic documentary is.

But for any grievances I have, this documentary/art film is still very impressive. I know something would have been lost from having watched it at home, too, instead of an IMAX screen, so I'm willing to be a little more generous when it comes to rating this.

It's astonishing how fortunate we are to feel the way we do when watching nature unfold. This majestic and ethereal spectacle that warms our hearts. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we must feel infinitely thankful for how evolution shaped us in a way that lets us marvel so profoundly at nature.

The more we learn about how humans work, how society works, how civilization works, how biology and physics work, how the collapse of a star will impact distant galaxies, the more we realize that everything is connected. Time and space is one sandbox in which infinitely small events play with other ones of unbounded cosmological proportions, all in a perfectly deterministic manner.

This teaches us that the only way we can feel what we're all truly looking for, which is to be loved, is to show our love to the world. To show it to other people, to animals, to plants, to the wind, to nature. Because nature is everything there is to know, and love. Because you are nature. Because loving nature is loving yourself. And the more you will learn about the world, the more this will all make sense.

This is what this movie is about.

A very slow film with little narration. The CGI blends seamlessly and is undetectable. Many (scientific) inaccuracies though, either from artistic expression or from ignorance. I viewed this at the Smithsonian's laser iMAX for $9. What I thought would be the highlight of my trip to Washington turned out to be the trough. This was the newest iMAX film there (and made especially for the Air & Space Museum?) and with the most renowned director and narrator. I only realized afterwards why it had only a single showing compared to the other films. The iMAX theater was not any better than the one back home, and I dozed off a few times.

Just like most of Malick's work from the last 20 years, pretentious, over-the-top, and boring. Some of the imagery and effects were good, except for the shots that were just made up nonsense. You don't even know what it is that you're watching when these appear, you'll know them when you see it. Also, Brad Pitt's whispering random words every 10 seconds seem to be just incoherent gibberish. Like a bad attempt at poetry? Pass on this one.

Not short enough to be a short and not long enough to be a feature, Terrence Malick's "Voyage of Time", (subtitled, 'The IMAX Experience' to give you an idea what kind of screen you should see it on), is like an extended sequence from "The Tree of Life" or outtakes from "2001; A Space Odyssey" and is visually superb as we might expect from Malick but it's hardly informative and even at 46 minutes is just as likely to bore as to enthrall.

Brad Pitt is the narrator who asks us do we ever wonder where we came from when we look at the stars or when did dust become life. Malick doesn't tell us and you will almost certainly get more information from a David Attenborough documentary than from this. That said, it looks amazing in ways that even Attenborough can't match and to Malick's credit he does ponder 'big' questions as if the asking itself is enough to satisfy the lack of an answer and anyone remotely interested in the visual power of cinema won't want to miss it and yes, see it on the biggest screen possible. There's also a 90 minute version, narrated by Cate Blanchet, and still awaiting a release.