Amazon.com essential video: Still one of American cinema's most powerful, daring filmmaking debuts, Terrence Malick's Badlands is a quirky, visionary psychological and social enigma masquerading as a simple lovers-on-the-lam flick. Inspired by the 1958 murders in the cold, stark badlands of South Dakota by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the film's plot, on the surface, is similar to that of other killing-couple films, like Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy. Martin Sheen, in an understated, sophisticated performance, plays the strange James Dean-like social outcast who falls in love with the naïve Sissy Spacek--and then kills her father when he comes between them. The two flee like animals to the wilderness, until the police arrive and the killing spree begins.
What sets the film apart from others of its genre is Malick's complicated approach. Gorgeous, impenetrable images contrast sharply with Spacek's nostalgically artless narration, serving as ironic counterpoints, blurring concrete meaning, and stressing that nothing this horrific is simple. Malick observes, rather than analyzes, the couple in a manner as detached and apathetic as the couple's shocking actions. No judgment or definitive motivations are offered, though Malick's empathy often leans toward his senseless protagonists, rather than the star-struck society that makes killers famous. Compared with the interchangeable uniform cops who hunt them and the film's other nameless characters stuck in suburban banality, the couple are presented like tarnished, warped and frustrated results of squelched individuality.
Badlands, on one level, views America's suffocating homogeneity and, conversely, its continued obsession with celebrities (individuals considered different but adored) as hypocritical. Ambiguous and bold, the movie hints that society may be as guilty as the killers. --Dave McCoy
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Some Notes on Badlands
Recently watching Badlands for the second time, I was less impressed than after the original viewing. But I figure enough people have given their reasons for liking or not liking the movie, so instead ... Read More
Rating: - Revisionist history + good acting = interesting movie.
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
I've never understood the mystique attached to Terrence Malick. I assumed this was because the first Malick film I saw was his 1998 desecration of The Thin ... Read More
Rating: - Not as well made as you think....
Okay okay, these reviews and everything got me going. I have seen all TM's films but this one and I gave it a go, calibrating my screen and readying the headphones.
WHAT A WASTE.
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Rating: - Quick on the Draw with a Finger on the Trigger
Badlands is Terrence Malick's first feature film, and paved the way for his acclaimed career. Badlands is a meditation on the relationship between 15 year old Holly and her older boyfriend, Kit as they ... Read More
Rating: - Hmmmm ! -- Question .........
Picture of the jacket-cover for this movie says: Starring Martin Sheen & Sissy Spacek. But you look to the right of the cover it reads: Starring: Dona Baldwin, Ramon Bieri. What is one to deduce about ... Read More
- Some Notes on Badlands
- Not as well made as you think....
- Quick on the Draw with a Finger on the Trigger