anticipate THE WAY OF THE WIND — terrence malick [2025, hopefully]

some details here:

https://thefilmstage.com/exclusive-terrence-malicks-three-hour-biblical-epic-the-way-of-the-wind-aims-for-2025-premiere-as-first-story-details-arrive/

Three-hour biblical epic? We'll party like it's 1961.

Reportedly they've been screening it for distributors, though Malick is also supposedly still editing down his 3000 hours of footage.

Lots of directors seem to have a Jesus movie as their holy grail (Scorsese, Mel Gibson, Paul Verhoeven). I wish I was more interested. I do love the more oblique religious stuff in his movies, but a direct Jesus story? Eh.

Btw, didn't realize Verhoeven wrote (edited?) a scholarly book about Jesus:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81QghUKSZtL._SY522_.jpg

Also btw, a week or so ago I learned that Malick originally intended his Criterion director's cut of "The New World" to just shuffle in nature footage at random. Sounds like a joke, and maybe it was, but also sounds exactly like something he would want.

Man if only this film would be about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAsuki-lqyM

I'm Christian and I'm here for this (and Marty's version)

Jesus had a pretty interesting life imo, would make a good movie

I was also a little disappointed when I heard this would be the topic of his next (last?) movie, since I also love how he has approached his Christianity in prior films, but I’ve come around to being excited about this.

Keeping up his streak of bad titles though

how he has approached his Christianity in prior films

pls explain / examples?

Do you mean his personal beliefs (of which I know almost nothing other than he reportedly attends/attended an Episcopal church here in Austin)? Or just Christian themes? Theodicy, conflict between spiritual feeling and ritual, Jobian grievance, and so on. A Hidden Life is a great double feature with Silence.

However, one of my favorite moments in all of his films is the brief shot of a Buddha statue inside a burning house in TTRL.

how he has approached his Christianity in prior films

I'd say in Thin Red Line in particular. I've always watched that movie as a parable of man at war with nature against the wishes and commands of (a Judeo-Christian) God. That is, God has created this Earth/Eden, and created man, and what does man do but go to war with Eden? That movie is full of talk of this nature (no pun intended) and ends more or less with an explicit Christ-like sacrifice on the part of Witt, the soldier who at the beginning has gone AWOL in awe of a more (seemingly) innocent native life in accord with nature and who by the end sacrifices himself (pacifically) for the sake of his fellow soldiers.

And of course Days of Heaven, from the title on down, is infused with Old Testament moments, right down to a plague of locusts. The same with The Tree of Life, in the title on down sense. Just a broad exploration of spirituality specifically rooted in (imo) Christianity. I'm not Christian or a scholar, though, so maybe I'm wrong. And tbh, despite Malick being one of my favorite directors, and despite getting so much from his movies, I ... still have not seen "To the Wonder," "Knight of Cups," "Song to Song" or "A Hidden Life." Something about the first three just rub me the wrong way. "A Hidden Life," that one I consider a total oversight on my part, just a victim of bad timing.

in addition to it being his most underappreciated work imo, the christianity in TO THE WONDER is hard to miss