Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience

Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time: The Imax Experience is a glorious cosmic reverie, a feast for the eyes and a balm for the soul in these angry, contentious times.

The film isn’t heavy on earth science, yet these orange-tinted tide pools and shuddering protomammals indicate a strain of serious research. The world is a miracle and a gift in the movie’s eyes; it would be no small thing if audiences left with the same sense of wonderment.

Malick seems to see everything on a cosmic and microscopic scale simultaneously. Drop him in the middle of a suburb and he’ll consider the magnificence of the children playing, the beauty of the grass, and the centuries it took for the rocks to form. That’s why it’s always going to be a rare gift to look at the world through his eyes — especially when he lets the images speak for themselves.

If the feature film reached for, and often failed to achieve, great emotions to match its imagery, the non-contemplative Imax Experience seems even farther from this goal. Vastness and infinity are all fine and good, but the beauty of the universe tends to feel monstrous and inhuman without an element of human chaos to counterbalance it.

It’s essentially a plotless montage, a spellbinding filmic tapestry. Its visuals are out of this world, quite literally in the early going, as it presents the story of the creation of the universe.

The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.

Voyage of Time is a beautiful diversion, but almost entirely empty, even in its inquisitive big swings for profundity.