Naturally Bad Santa Kills Thirty in the Bad Lands

Terrence Malick doesn’t make movies very often, and until 1998’s The Thin Red Line, he had not made one since the 1970s. No wonder that I didn’t really know who was until then. He now has four movies to his credit: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005).

The Thin Red Line was impressive: its scale was remarkable, the characters were interesting and engaging, and the photography was vivid and teeming with life. The only problem was that those things don’t necessarily make for a good movie. I have to actually enjoy movies to call them good, and The Thin Red Line wasn’t enjoyable. Sure, its technical work was some of the best I had ever seen, but the movie was just a bit too sprawling—it needed a lot of editing to make it into a good, coherent film.

So I had never really sought out Malick’s other films until I noticed Badlands in the library. Knowing that my wife was going out with her cousins on Friday night, I grabbed it. For those of you who know my wife, you know that it’s better to keep these movies from her. Trust me.

Now I am a Malick fan. This one had all of the beautiful technical details of The Thin Red Line without the lack of editing. It included all of the beautiful scenery and photography, but it wasn’t overdone like in his newer film. Here, it’s all set to serve the story of these two lovers, played wonderfully by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Those two actors are so good that they made me believe that these characters would actually do the terrible and crazy things that they do in the film. Few actors could have done that.

Badlands made me reassess Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), too. Notice that in my review of Stone’s films above, I didn’t mention Natural Born Killers as one of his masterpieces, and that fact is that Killers suffers from its overdone style. While it attempts something interesting, the style of the film eventually overpowers its own story and leaves the movie and its viewers a bit, well, empty. I’m sure its defenders would say that this is the point, but all stone achieves is a satire on our fascination with criminals, and I don’t see the point of that when Malick had already done it in Badlands.

These two films—Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994)—share a similar plot but with different ends. Natural Born Killers is there to glorify and make us love the characters while undermining their glory at every turn. In other words, its purpose is to make us question our own love of violence. And it does it in a sick and playful way that I think works against its own theory. Badlands, however, isn’t content to make fun of its characters. Where Natural Born Killers’s psychology within the film remains on the level of “violence is cool, so it’s cool to be a killer,” Badlands takes us inside its characters and explains how they could actually do the things they do. Some things are left up to mystery, but Martin Sheen does what he has to, not what he wants to. Woody Harrelson is humorous as a killer, while Sheen is tortured.

It's a big difference, one that makes Badlands a remarkable movie.

Grade for Badlands: 9