UPDATE: The official trailer is now available here.
If you didn’t already need a reason to see Black Swan this weekend, the very first trailer for Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life is attached as we reported. It was playing on a loop at the LA Fox Searchlight party last night, and now 24 Frames has dissected the entire piece. Check out some excerpts below, as well as two new official stills, and head over to their site for the full write-up. If you want the first full details on his next (next) film, tentatively titled The Burial, read our story here. Let the fun begin:
There’s a distinct visual look, and a grand scope, and even of a sense of narrative (sort of). What’s hinted at here is a big-canvas movie in the best sense, one with both cosmic significance and intimate drama.
The piece begins with several mystical shots of smoke and fire before diving into the birth of young Jack O’Brien. “He’ll be grown before that tree is tall,” his mother, Jessica Chastain’s Mrs. O’Brien, says. And indeed, we soon track a boy playing with bubbles, roughhousing with his brothers and engaging in other boyhood activities in a Mayberry-esque town circa the 1950s.
Interpolated into the trailer are all kinds of this sort of visual poetry — shots of vast landscapes and religious half-light and spinning planets, along with one very weird shot of what could be a lunar (but is more likely a prehistoric) dark landscape. (No dinosaurs, though, at least not here.) Earth’s basic elements are also a motif: cascading water, leaping flames, etc. And then there’s the trailer’s best shot: a square-on look at the bottom of a baby’s foot that signals Jack’s arrival into the world.
Here is the song in the trailer (Smetana‘s The Moldau):
The Tree of Life hits theaters May 27th, 2011 and you may wanna see Black Swan since Searchlight has said it won’t be online for awhile.
Will you be in line for Black Swan this weekend?