Badlands

A few years back, when we first saw this 1973 Terrence Malick movie, we adored the spectral msuic, images and tone of this movie. It surprised us, on second viewing, in a number of ways.
The opening uses a lot of close up shots. In fact, we have a sense of a very enclosed enviroment, of tight personas unable to look outside of their bubbles. Malick is partly trying to get us to identify with characters who will soon be doing 'unsympathetic' things, but is also perhaps a little bit reticent in going for the wide shots he really wants; the early Malick feels he has to pay his dues to the characterisation. There is thus a sense of freedom when he gets to the wide skies that take up most of the screen, the shots he really wants. These are the finest moments in the film, the wide angles and the small, thin figures.
The film has more of a tone of humour than we remembered, perhaps a slight sign of nerviness in the director. The tone is of that innocence, that forgiveness, which Malick does generally a fine job of balancing with the more serious questions.
And these questions are serious. The question of nice guys, perhaps, or at least innocent people, who fall into this catalogue of things we see from the outside as 'bad'. Does it make them morally evil? The spectre of Vietnam, of innocents committing atrocities, hangs over the end of the film.
This is an entertaining film, with only in stabs the visual beauty we remembered, and a slightly less powerful tone. One of the finest films in Hollywood, partly due to a kind of uncertain, naive, brittleness.