Finally watching this just as Mr. Malick intended (he deserves a Mister after his long and monolithic career, probably), on... MUBI. Well, it's the only way to watch this version (for now)! Why isn't this playing on National Cinema Day? Oh, well, let's go on this voyage and see what time I gain in 45 minutes...
(later) Wow, that was not the quickest nor the slowest 45 minutes of my life. It is... 45 minutes! It went by fully in exactly that amouny of time because of the grandeur on display that Malick and his special effects wizards conjure so vividly and ecstatically - Dan Glass the supervisor, who also worked a lot for better or worse with the Wachowskis in this century - to do nothing else but put you into awe at IMAX-frames per second. And I'd love to see it the intended format someday, if the opportunity presented itself, since it's without doubt the director and his team made this for the largest 20 foot story screens with a few dozen speakers and tracks going to blast you into the entire sonic symphony of the choral voices and orchestral majesty that this also puts you in.
This is easily criticized for being just more of the same that we saw with a human story in the context of The Tree of Life, and I dont doubt on some level Malick sees Voyage as another experiment in compliment of but not directly connected to that film (I admittedly haven't seen the other cut, it seems unavailable in the US for now). But that is also what makes Voyage in Time special as a pure shot of philosophical-poet-visual Planetarium-Maximus. These filmmakers mean to do nothing short of putting you into a context that you can't fully comprehend but you still feel anyway as... this is where it starts.
Everything, as in, the universe colliding upon itself this way and that through particles and gasses and things that would require an astronomer to unpack and even then what's the use when it's all on randomness and improbable chaos, and then what that leads to on Earth as the beginnings of life and death take hold. There are many arresting, bombastic images and Tableaus (and dinosaurs!) and so little time relatively to cover it all, not just in the space of how long the Earth has been here, but in comparison with other IMAX films, which this clocks as average. Yet the intensity of the spectacle, the thoughtfulness, comes not from Pitt's narration, which is written to be as blunt about the absolutism of Malick's ideology of nature's boundless forces and how humanity will never stop taking it for granted (or, conversely, can simply appreciate it more), but from the mere showing of all this itself.
To go back to my earlier point with Tree of Life, it's the scale and spectacle of what the universe does in its own cosmic poetical ways, about (hold laughter please) our caring and empathy for the planet to be paramount and our societies connecting back to what chaotic particles wrought, and given what is happening to nature in the world at present (hottest year recorded, ever), that should stop us in our tracks. And it does. This is all to say Voyage in Time is impressive most as an appreciation by the Grand Old Pure Hippie of American cinema (pure in his connection to the roots of the planet and Space and time, not the consumerist or druggie aspects) and if it stops short at a point where it could keep going it may just be for the best.
Aided by some astoundingly gifted collaborators, and some nifty IMAX 70mm film stock, it's best to temper your expectations depending on who you are - it isn't the Grand consciousness-expanding opera of Tree of Life (nor does it have that film's spots of ostentatious excesses), and it isn't the big PLANETS documentary you see in 4K with a stuffy British Narrator. It is... somewhere in between as an epic transcendentalist waking dream with eyes and ears opens and electrified in the experimental bliss and simple wisdom it unfurls, and I'm satisfied.
