Badlands Details

Shooting stars

Watching this film, you wonder what the protagonists would make of it all if they could watch themselves through our eyes. Holly and Kit are, after all, resolutely self-obsessed, and obsessed by the Hollywood stars that perhaps they imagine themselves to be (and as Sissey Spacek and Martin Sheen, would of course become). They are bored by small-town life, social rules, and pretty much everything except killing, driving and their reflection in each others eyes. Sex would just get in the way, and they make sure it never does.

Would they notice Terence Malick’s ability to craft unexpected, wholly original, image after image, like some holiday scrapbook from a country that no-one had ever visited? Would these pictures chime with Holly’s adolescent diary as she read it aloud to us, a fumbling attempt at articulacy that she and Kit never try to reproduce with each other? How would Kit regard himself choosing the right hat for his showdown with the Law? Would they wonder what made them go on such an unmotivated killing spree, would they wonder at just how fascinating the two of them could be?

I guess no matter what they saw, they wouldn’t say a word. It takes a rare talent to know how to be quiet, loudly.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Less distressing than the injured mouse the cat dragged in...

This is the study of the personality disordered . Sheen is a psychopath and his younger female associate (they don't do friends) Ms. antisocial, with all the requisite dissasociative features. The success of this film is that it does exactly what it sets out to do...to relate the story of a killer and leave the baggage that is empathy, logic and emotion out of the equation. This is reinforced by the reaction of the law at the end of the film. There is liitle to say about this film as it succeeds in not drawing one into forming any attachment whatsover with any of the characters, perpetrator and victims alike. The subtle detail is effective in referencing the complex simplicity that is the psychopath and it is this that makes it worth viewing, enjoying, forgetting about and revisiting in another couple of years. A film that hasn't and won't age because it got it right the first time around.

As for its transference to the recent Oasis drinks add on UK TV - me likey!