Category: Voyage of Time

Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time documentary was decades in the making, a realization of a vision and a goal for the filmmaker — an exploration of the universe and all creation, billed as a look into our planetary past and a search for humanity’s place in the future.

There are two versions of the film, one a 90-minute version which premiered to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival and a shorter, 45-minute IMAX version narrated by Brad Pitt, described as a more explanatory version. In his review of the 90-minute version, Variety’s Chief Film Critic Owen Gleiberman called it “a mystic love poem to the unfathomable splendor of the natural world.” In the film, Malick expands on the birth-of-the-universe sequence from his own Tree Of Life and shows an array of never-witnessed natural phenomena — celestial and terrestrial, macroscopic and microscopic — in a variety of new ways.

Read more.

Brad Pitt said on Tuesday he was skipping the premiere of his latest project to focus “on my family situation” and not distract from the educational documentary, following his highly publicized marital split from Angelina Jolie.

Pitt, 52, narrated the 45-minute IMAX documentary film “Voyage of Time,” directed by Terrence Malick, which he called “incredibly beautiful.”

“I’m very grateful to be part of such a fascinating and educational project, but I’m currently focused on my family situation and don’t want to distract attention away from this extraordinary film, which I encourage everyone to see,” the actor said in a statement.

It was Pitt’s second statement since news of the Hollywood power couple’s split broke last week.

Read more.

Terrence Malick’s history of the universe flies by in under an hour on the giant Imax screen.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival a week after the 35mm feature film Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey bowed in Venice, the 45-minute Voyage of Time, The Imax Experience is not surprisingly the more visceral physical experience. It also is far less magical and mystical than the longer version, where Cate Blanchett questions the Mother about her purpose in the universe. Here, co-producer Brad Pitt’s matter-of-fact narration is stripped of spiritual connotations and seems aimed to dazzle a younger audience of children and students. As the history of the universe speeds by in spectacular full-screen images, the eerie, intimate, urgent need to know why, which was so unique in Life’s Journey, dissolves into a pure documentary and writer-director Terrence Malick’s voice is muted beneath all those superb visual effects.

Though the wonder of galaxies, nature and the planet Earth is magnified to room-size, the feeling of awe is undercut by a perhaps inevitably rushed quality. Let’s say that 45 minutes isn’t a whole lot of time to cover several billion years of natural history. Nearly all the shots used by editors Keith Fraase and Rehman Ali in the Imax film are present in the feature, which was long enough to give them time to construct a symphonic build-up to emotional peaks. Here, there is less music, more facts. On the other hand, the shorter format seems to follow the same structure of a chronological timeline, and no major sequence has been cut out.

Read more.

Tree of Life helmer Terrence Malick is to premiere his long-awaited documentary Voyage of Time at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival.

The doc will screen in the ‘Venezia 73? international competition at the Italian fest, which runs from August 31 to September 10.

IMAX – one of the doc’s backers – revealed in May that the film will be released on October 7, stirring speculation around either a Venice or Toronto premiere. Voyage of Time has been in development for more than 30 years, and examines the birth and death of the universe and existence of life on Earth.

The film is slated to launch with two versions released simultaneously. A 90-minute version of the film, narrated by Knight of Cups actor Cate Blanchett, will screen at Venice, while Tree of Life actor Brad Pitt narrates the 40-minute Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience.

Read more.