More Than Just a Pretty Picture: Revisiting Terrence Malick’s The New World
In The Thin Red Line, first blood is drawn on a cloudy afternoon when, without warning, a Japanese sniper picks off two American soldiers as they ascend a ridge. Before the shock can pass, sunlight emerges, illuminating the hillside grass into which the fallen bodies have vanished. Right here is the essence of Malick’s existential outlook: the utter inconsequence of our short lives compared to the ancient landscape we inhabit and aim to conquer. We all know that a holocaust follows the events of The New World, and Malick doesn’t spell it out for us. His vision does not distinguish between the wars humans wage against each other and the barbarism our technologies inflict on our ecosystem. The achievement of The New World is not to evoke a paradise lost, but to conjure the terrible beauty of the one we remain intent on destroying.
