Reviews

There is far too much exposition by cable news for my taste. The geopolitical ramifications of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization sound exciting, but it was as boring as watching CSPAN.

Aliens who look like giant squids and write with ink in the air have landed on twelve sites on earth. The U. S. military recruits a linguist, played by Amy Adams, who tries to decipher the alien language to figure out whether the aliens are here to help us or to hurt us. This is an interesting set-up for a film that delves into the philosophy of language and the nature of time. Specifically, the film supports the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language not only lets us express our thoughts but also determines our thoughts. While this is an intriguing hypothesis, the notion that learning an alien language could change our perception of time and let us peer into the future is an absurdity.

The Tree of Life is a unique experimental drama of a family wrestling with the death of a child and searching for religious and philosophical answers to the problem of evil.

The first scene introduces the way of nature and the way of grace: Nature is the survival of the fittest, whereas grace is love and forgiveness. The strict father represents the way of nature, and the loving mother represents the way of grace.

The mother hears her youngest child has died at age eighteen, and she asks God, "Where were you?" As if to answer her question, there is a breathtaking flashback to the creation of the universe and the origin of life on earth.

Meanwhile, her eldest son, Jack, now a middle-aged man, confronts the reality of his younger brother's death. Wandering through a city, lost in the modern world, Jack remembers growing up with his brothers and losing his innocence in a series of impressionistic flashbacks.

Torn between the way of nature and the way of grace, he sees a vision of the afterlife where the dead unite with lost loved ones and understand all things in the fullness of time.

The Tree of Life is not narrative cinema; it is avant-garde experimental cinema. While it is incomprehensible to some, it is visually breathtaking to all.

Somehow, Wolverine and Professor Xavier wound up washed up and defeated, although the story never explains how or why. They needlessly cause the death of an innocent family. Why is the audience supposed to root for them again? Also, in this universe, comic books predict the future and yet that is not what the whole movie is about.

To make matters worse, the screenwriters are not even subtle about their biases: A villain named Donald hunts illegal immigrant children across America.

For all the blood and gore, this is the most boring movie I have ever seen.

I am unsure what is most implausible:

1. A futuristic dystopian society still uses flip phones and Windows 95; 2. Secret agents wear sunglasses at night to let everyone know that they are secret agents; 3. Secret agents wiretap a phone call and hear a revolutionary tell the hero to meet at a bridge but are not waiting for him when he arrives; or 4. The hero dies and comes back to life through the power of love.

The idea that reality is an illusion is the premise of several other movies, such as Dark City, which came out a year before The Matrix. There is nothing new except slow-motion bullets.

The serial killer -- a religious fundamentalist who chooses his victims based on the seven deadly sins -- kills a pregnant woman not because of a sin that she committed but because of a sin that he committed. Then he lets the victim who represents wrath live. It is so out of character.

IMDB should not call this a "mystery." It is not a whodunit. This is hardly even the greatest film in the serial killer genre, and it is unworthy of its position in the IMDB top 250.