Science in the Art House

Most movies have a beginning, middle and an end. But how can a movie maker portray the vast scope of a story when it starts at the beginning of the universe and proceeds out of order to the present and then to an unknowable future? That’s the difficult task that acclaimed director Terrence Malik undertook in the making of Tree of Life.

Critics were evenly split between loving and hating the film. It was perhaps the most expensive art house film, spending two years on special effects in post-production alone.

And part of that was due to the nature of the movie. Images from the Hubble Telescope were animated and put in 3D to convey the ability to travel through both space and time. The story within the movie begins with the birth of the universe, though it centers around a 1950s Texas family. The interplay between the natural world and the relationships of the characters opened a wide door for science to creep into an emotional context, giving depth and heart to the high resolution images from space.

Chris Lee reviewed the film for Newsweek/The Daily Beast and says, the “eye-popping visuals” set the scene for “trippy sequences that wrangle with themes of cosmic oneness—visuals such as the formation of Earth from the accretion of solar nebulae 4.5 billion years ago, imagery of the universe’s roiling primordial soup and what amounts to a sub-plot concerning a couple of soulful dinosaurs.”

Tree of Life began as a movie Malik conceived in 1978 called Q. After letting it incubate for 20 years, he returned to the film in 1998, which involved shooting microscopic jellyfish on the Great Barrier Reef, solar eclipses and even ice floes in Antarctica.

As Lee says, for Malik Q was supposed to be “a film encompassing his childhood, the creation of the universe, and what it all means.”

After 21 years orbiting in space, the Hubble Telescope sent back its one millionth science observation earlier this month. In sync with the space telescope Malik included some of the most recognizable images in a movie that has been orbiting him almost as long.

Critics argue over why he included these universal images. Perhaps they were used to punctuate a Bible verse mentioned at the beginning of the movie: Job 38, to spur the audience to think about where God is in human suffering. Or maybe the images are used to juxtapose the forces of brute nature and spiritual grace as the film examines two possible life paths and how they neither has to be mutually exclusive.

The style of the film allows the audience to draw its own conclusions and make individual connections. And it gives these beautiful images of distant galaxies a real place in our lives.

Tree of Life (movie trailer)