Jake Cole’s review published on Letterboxd:
Have any Malick characters been so completely and utterly closed off from the world as Kit and Holly? Their fairy-tale view of the world, with its delicate "Gassenhauer" score and dreamy voiceovers, is not the awed connection with nature that creeps into Malick's other works but a garish, false construction, a total inability to process the world's overwhelming wonder that necessitates the fabrication of a smokescreen version of it that can be projected against gloomy skies and terrain so flat the horizon line practically feels like it exists in the middle distance plane.
At its best, BADLANDS shows a capacity for multitudes that Malick would only further develop. Its juxtaposition of Spacek's airy narration and Sheen's murder spree remains the most open display of a seemingly humorless director's irony, which also contains subtler layers. Holly's brief, oblivious revelation that she sometimes fantasizes about shoving Kit into water to drown just to watch it happen is an offhand remark echoed in subtler jokes like the one in THE NEW WORLD as John Smith rhapsodizes about the natives having no sense of ownership as those same natives plot to kill him to protect their turf. The world may be shot with sturdier, less poetic finesse than later efforts, but Malick still positions it as a vast entity, at one with humanity even as humanity is so often at odds with it, and complex enough to handle that contradiction easily.
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