June 21, 2026
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Episode 74: The Tree of Life and Bottom Five Creations

Since this episode lands on Father’s Day, Jay decides to do something thematic for a change and assigns Mike one of the most acclaimed and divisive films of the 21st century: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Is the film a profound meditation on fathers and sons, memory, grief, faith, and the very nature of existence? Or is it an overlong exercise in whispered narration, floating cameras, and cosmic self-importance? The guys tackle that question head-on and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the film’s subject matter, find themselves wandering into some unexpectedly personal territory along the way. After the review, the guys count down their Bottom Five Creations, a collection of inventions, monsters, products, and catastrophically misguided acts of ingenuity that probably should have remained on the drawing board. Then it’s time once again for Dueling Double Bills, where Mike and Jay attempt to pair randomly selected films into seat-filling double features and, as usual, discover that agreement is far less likely than argument. Finally, in a move that may qualify as self-harm under certain legal definitions, Mike and Jay announce an upcoming trip to the movie theater, where they’ll willingly exchange approximately two mortgage payments for tickets, popcorn, and whatever fresh cinematic Hell awaits them on the big screen.

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The Tree of Life — Discussion Notes

Overall Position / Starting Take

  • I did not think The Tree of Life was a pretentious bore.
  • I also do not think I landed fully in the “undeniable masterpiece” camp.
  • My reaction is somewhere in the middle:
    • Enormously ambitious.
    • Often beautiful.
    • Sometimes genuinely moving.
    • Occasionally frustrating.
    • Frequently self-serious.
    • And at times so committed to poetic ambiguity that it risks becoming dramatically evasive.

Possible phrasing:“I admire it more than I loved it, but there were stretches where I did love it.”

The Big Divide: Masterpiece or Pretentious Bore?

  • The movie almost seems designed to split audiences into two camps:
    • People who see it as one of the great spiritual/cinematic statements of the century.
    • People who see it as a whispered, slow-motion cologne commercial with dinosaurs.
  • I can understand both reactions.
  • I was surprised by how much of the family material worked for me.
  • I was less persuaded by some of the cosmic framing and especially the Sean Penn material.

Possible phrasing:“The movie is not empty. I think there is a real emotional center here. But I also think Malick occasionally buries that center under so much awe that the awe starts calling attention to itself.”

The Father’s Day Connection

  • I picked this for Father’s Day because, obviously, it is deeply concerned with fathers and sons.
  • But it is not a warm-and-fuzzy Father’s Day movie.
  • This is Father’s Day by way of:
    • Childhood awe.
    • Generational pain.
    • Emotional repression.
    • Regret.
    • Spiritual confusion.
    • The terrible realization that your parents were people before they were symbols.
  • Brad Pitt’s father character is not a monster, but he is hard, proud, volatile, and often frightening.
  • The film understands that fathers can be both formative and damaging.
  • It also captures the way children experience a parent as almost godlike:
    • Protector.
    • Judge.
    • Weather system.
    • Source of love.
    • Source of fear.

Possible phrasing:“It’s a Father’s Day movie in the sense that it makes you think about your father, then your children, then death, then the birth of the universe, and then whether you remembered to call anybody.”

The Family Story Is the Strongest Part

  • The 1950s family material is where the movie is most powerful.
  • Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and the boys feel like a real family.
  • The film is very good at capturing childhood not as plot, but as memory:
    • Running through yards.
    • Sneaking around houses.
    • Testing boundaries.
    • Being cruel in small ways.
    • Feeling guilt before fully understanding morality.
    • Watching your parents and slowly realizing they are flawed.
  • The boys’ performances are incredibly natural.
  • The relationship between Jack and R.L. is especially strong.
  • The family sections feel like the emotional spine of the movie.

Possible phrasing:“The best parts of the movie feel less written than remembered.”

Brad Pitt as the Father

  • Pitt is excellent.
  • He plays the father as stern, disappointed, loving, frustrated, and trapped inside his own idea of what a man is supposed to be.
  • He wants his sons to be strong, but his methods often make them afraid.
  • He clearly loves his family, but he does not always know how to express that love without control.
  • He is a man who feels cheated by life and passes that bitterness down without fully understanding he is doing it.
  • There’s a tragedy in him:
    • He wanted greatness.
    • He settled into ordinary life.
    • He resents the world.
    • And his family absorbs the fallout.

Possible phrasing:“Pitt is playing a man who loves his children, but has confused preparing them for the cruelty of the world with becoming part of that cruelty himself.”

Jessica Chastain as the Mother / Grace

  • Chastain represents “grace” more clearly than an ordinary human character.
  • She is gentle, luminous, nurturing, forgiving.
  • The movie presents her almost as an idealized memory of motherhood.
  • This is beautiful, but it also risks making her less fully human than Pitt’s character.
  • Pitt gets contradiction. Chastain gets symbolism.
  • That may be intentional, since we are seeing much of this through Jack’s memory.
  • But it still creates a tension:
    • The father is complicated.
    • The mother is beatific.
    • Nature is messy.
    • Grace is ethereal.

Possible phrasing:“I understand why she’s presented that way, but I did sometimes wish the movie allowed grace to be as human and contradictory as nature.”

Nature vs. Grace

  • This is one of the central ideas of the film.
  • The mother introduces the two paths:
    • The way of nature.
    • The way of grace.
  • Nature:
    • Competitive.
    • Harsh.
    • Self-interested.
    • Proud.
    • Survival-driven.
  • Grace:
    • Forgiving.
    • Loving.
    • Humble.
    • Accepting.
    • Selfless.
  • The movie often frames these as opposing forces.
  • My critique: I’m not sure the film always balances them.
  • It sometimes seems to elevate grace by making nature feel almost spiritually suspect.
  • But human beings are not purely one or the other.
  • The most interesting life happens in the overlap.

Possible phrasing:“I kept thinking that grace is most powerful when it moves through nature, not when it floats above it.”

Dostoevsky / The Brothers Karamazov Comparison

  • I brought up Dostoevsky because The Brothers Karamazov also deals with fathers, sons, faith, suffering, guilt, grace, and human nature.
  • But Dostoevsky feels more comfortable letting the sacred and the grotesque coexist.
  • In Dostoevsky:
    • Grace does not erase human messiness.
    • Grace enters into it.
    • People are lustful, selfish, angry, foolish, spiritual, loving, ridiculous, and redeemable at the same time.
  • Malick, by contrast, sometimes seems to split the world too cleanly:
    • Father/nature/hardness.
    • Mother/grace/light.
  • The film is at its best when those categories blur.

Possible phrasing:“Dostoevsky gives you grace with dirt under its fingernails. Malick sometimes gives you grace backlit in a field.”

Sean Penn / Adult Jack Material

  • This was probably the weakest strand for me.
  • Sean Penn mostly wanders through modern architecture looking spiritually constipated.
  • I understand the idea:
    • Adult Jack is alienated.
    • He is remembering.
    • He is grieving.
    • He is trapped in modernity, disconnected from childhood, faith, nature, and family.
  • But dramatically, those scenes often feel thin.
  • The modern material interrupts the emotional flow more than it deepens it.
  • It may work conceptually, but it does not always work emotionally.
  • Penn’s section feels more like a framing device than a fully realized dramatic component.

Possible phrasing:“I understand why Sean Penn is in the movie. I’m less convinced the movie proves he needed to be.”

Another possible line:“Every time we cut back to Sean Penn wandering around glass buildings, I felt like the movie was leaving its own best material.”

The Cosmic / Creation Sequence

  • The creation-of-the-universe material is obviously ambitious.
  • Some of it is stunning.
  • Some of it is also where the movie most risks losing people.
  • I get the intent:
    • One family’s grief placed against all of existence.
    • Personal pain measured against cosmic time.
    • The death of a son connected to the birth and suffering of everything.
  • When it works, it expands the emotional stakes.
  • When it doesn’t, it can feel like Malick pressing the “important cinema” button.
  • The dinosaur moment is fascinating because it is either:
    • A profound image of mercy emerging in nature.
    • Or the moment some viewers completely check out.
  • I can respect the swing, even when I’m not sure it fully lands.

Possible phrasing:“You have to admire a movie that says, ‘To understand this family, first we need to go back to the formation of the universe.’ I don’t know if I buy it, but I admire the audacity.”

The Brother Confusion / R.L. and Steve

  • There are three brothers:
    • Jack.
    • R.L.
    • Steve.
  • R.L. is the brother who dies at nineteen.
  • The film is intentionally vague about the exact cause of death.
  • Steve, the youngest brother, sometimes fades into the background during the childhood material.
  • That can be confusing on a first watch because Malick’s editing is impressionistic rather than clarifying.
  • The film behaves like memory:
    • Some people become vivid.
    • Others blur.
    • Time compresses.
    • Emotional importance matters more than literal continuity.
  • That said, the ambiguity can become disorienting.
  • There is a difference between poetic mystery and basic viewer confusion.

Possible phrasing:“I’m fine with ambiguity, but there were moments where I wasn’t having a mystical experience so much as asking, ‘Wait, where did the other kid go?’”

R.L.’s Death

  • R.L.’s death is the emotional wound around which the movie circles.
  • The film does not treat it like a plot mystery.
  • It is more like a spiritual rupture.
  • The lack of explanation may be intentional:
    • The cause matters less than the fact of loss.
    • The family is left asking why.
    • The movie expands that “why” into a cosmic question.
  • This is one of the more effective uses of ambiguity.
  • Grief often does not come with satisfying explanation.
  • Still, viewers who want narrative clarity may find it frustrating.

Possible phrasing:“The movie is not interested in how he died. It is interested in what grief does to the living.”

Malick’s Style / Authenticity vs. Artificiality

  • Malick is clearly pursuing a kind of natural, spontaneous authenticity.
  • The camera drifts.
  • Characters move through light.
  • Kids play, run, whisper, and interact in fragments.
  • But paradoxically, the pursuit of authenticity sometimes feels staged.
  • Some moments feel profound.
  • Others feel like actors have been directed to behave “naturally” in a way that becomes self-conscious.
  • The style is gorgeous, but it can become mannered.
  • It is possible for a movie to be loose and controlled at the same time — and sometimes the control shows.

Possible phrasing:“There are moments where it feels like Malick captures real life, and moments where it feels like he has very carefully arranged spontaneity.”

Whispered Narration

  • The whispered voiceover is central to the Malick experience.
  • Sometimes it works beautifully:
    • Like prayer.
    • Like memory.
    • Like half-formed thought.
  • Sometimes it edges toward parody.
  • It can feel less like people thinking and more like people auditioning for a perfume ad about the soul.
  • The trailer-volume joke fits here:
    • Listeners may need to turn up the trailer because the voiceover is likely whispered directly into a blade of grass.

Possible phrasing:“I don’t object to whispered narration on principle, but after a while I did start wondering if anyone in this family had ever completed a declarative sentence.”

Visuals / Cinematography

  • Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is extraordinary.
  • The movie is visually stunning.
  • The camera creates a sense of wonder, memory, and spiritual searching.
  • The childhood scenes in particular are beautifully photographed.
  • The visual language does a lot of emotional work:
    • Low angles.
    • Natural light.
    • Movement through doorways, trees, water, grass.
    • Bodies in motion rather than conventional coverage.
  • Even when the film frustrates me, it is never visually boring.
  • It is one of those movies where nearly every frame feels intentional.

Possible phrasing:“I had issues with the movie, but visually, it is operating at an absurdly high level.”

Performances

Brad Pitt

  • Best performance in the film for me.
  • Complex, intimidating, wounded, loving, resentful.
  • He makes the father human rather than simply symbolic.

Jessica Chastain

  • Beautiful, gentle, almost otherworldly.
  • Works emotionally, though she is more symbol than person.

Hunter McCracken

  • Strong, natural lead child performance.
  • Captures resentment, guilt, curiosity, cruelty, fear, and longing.

Laramie Eppler

  • R.L. has a softness that contrasts with Jack.
  • His presence makes the later grief land.

Tye Sheridan

  • Youngest brother Steve is present but less central.
  • Because the movie is so impressionistic, he can feel like he disappears for stretches.

Sean Penn

  • The most underused / least satisfying major presence.
  • Functions more as haunted adult avatar than full character.

Emotional Core

  • The film is strongest when it stays with:
    • Childhood.
    • Fathers and sons.
    • The terror of disappointing a parent.
    • The guilt of being cruel to someone you love.
    • The ache of remembering a lost sibling.
    • The way family life becomes mythologized in memory.
  • I was moved by the family dynamic.
  • I recognized pieces of childhood and parenthood in it.
  • The film understands how small domestic moments can feel enormous when remembered later.

Possible phrasing:“The movie works best when the cosmic stuff is serving the family story, not when the family story feels like an excuse for the cosmic stuff.”

Personal Takeaway

  • I do not share all of the film’s spiritual assumptions.
  • But I do connect with its concern over how we live.
  • The most useful takeaway for me:
    • Do not live rigidly.
    • Do not confuse strength with hardness.
    • Do not pass your disappointments on to your children.
    • Try to balance discipline with tenderness.
    • Try to live fully before everything becomes memory.
  • That, to me, is where the film lands most powerfully.
  • Not in the grand cosmic answers, but in the intimate human warning.

Possible phrasing:“The movie did not convince me it had answers to the universe, but it did convince me that how we treat the people closest to us matters more than almost anything.”

Final Verdict Shape

Possible final position:

  • I admire The Tree of Life.
  • I understand why people call it a masterpiece.
  • I also understand why people hate it.
  • I think the family material is genuinely great.
  • The cinematography is astonishing.
  • Pitt is excellent.
  • The themes are rich.
  • But the Sean Penn material is thin.
  • The cosmic ambition sometimes overwhelms the human drama.
  • The style occasionally crosses from poetic into self-parodic.
  • I would not dismiss it.
  • I’m also not ready to fully canonize it.

Possible closing line:“For me, The Tree of Life is a movie with moments of greatness inside a structure I don’t always trust.”

Alternative closing line:“I don’t think it’s a pretentious bore. I think it’s a sincere, beautiful, sometimes frustrating movie that occasionally mistakes obscurity for profundity — but when it works, it really does work.”

Quick Grab-Bag Lines

  • “This is Father’s Day cinema for people who think brunch lacks sufficient existential dread.”
  • “It’s either one of the greatest films of the century or the world’s most expensive whispered prayer.”
  • “The best parts feel remembered, not written.”
  • “Sean Penn wanders through this movie like a man who lost his parking garage and found God instead.”
  • “I admire the audacity of connecting one family’s grief to the creation of the universe. I’m just not always sure the bridge holds.”
  • “Grace is most interesting when it has to survive contact with actual human mess.”
  • “Brad Pitt’s character loves his sons, but he has mistaken fear for preparation.”
  • “Jessica Chastain is less a character than a memory of perfect maternal gentleness.”
  • “The movie is never visually boring, even when it’s dramatically slippery.”
  • “Two people can watch this and have completely different reactions — or at least think they watched the same movie.”

Bottom Five Creations

For this week’s Bottom Five, since The Tree of Life takes a modest little swing at the creation of the universe, I decided to go with Bottom Five Creations.

But I want to be clear about the rules here, because this could very easily become a list of “bad movies someone created,” and that’s not what I’m doing. I’m not saying, “Why did Hollywood create Cats?” or “Why did anyone create the live-action Cat in the Hat?” Tempting as that may be.

For my list, I tried to keep the picks inside the world of the film. These are creations that exist within the story itself: things intentionally made, summoned, engineered, invented, designed, or unleashed by people — or gods, or corporations, or governments — who really should have stopped somewhere between the first bad idea and the second signed purchase order.

These are not accidents. These are not merely poor decisions. These are creations that somebody, somewhere, looked at and said, “Yes. This. This is what the world needs.”

And in every case, the world very much did not need it.

5. Bond Villain Creations

At number five, I’m going broad with Bond villains, because if there’s one thing James Bond has taught us, it’s that limitless money, genius-level engineering, and a complete absence of emotional regulation will inevitably lead to the dumbest possible use of technology.

And look, this goes back early. By the time Goldfinger came out in 1964, with Sean Connery in his third Bond film, the series was already figuring out that the villain’s scheme was not enough. The villain also needed infrastructure. Auric Goldfinger couldn’t just be a rich lunatic obsessed with gold. He needed a laser table, a mute hat-throwing assassin, a plan involving Fort Knox, and the kind of personal branding that suggests he would absolutely have a monogrammed evil bathrobe.

Bond villains do not simply commit crimes. They commission architecture.

They build underwater cities. They hollow out volcanoes. They construct orbital death lasers. They design elaborate lairs with retractable floors, shark tanks, monorails, control rooms, and ventilation systems apparently built by unionized henchmen with impeccable mid-century taste.

And the creations are almost never practical. That’s what makes them beautiful. A normal criminal might rob a bank. A Bond villain builds a secret base inside a mountain, develops a new energy weapon, hires three hundred jumpsuited employees, and then explains the whole thing to the one British man most likely to blow it up.

The Bond villain creation is one of cinema’s purest expressions of bad genius: wildly expensive, morally deranged, logistically impossible, and usually undone because the designer could not resist adding a self-destruct button.

4. Gozer’s Creation Offer / Stay Puft — Ghostbusters

At number four, I’m going with Gozer’s offer in Ghostbusters, because of course I am. I know Mike is not quite as high on this movie as I am, possibly because he has some kind of Dan Aykroyd allergy, but Ghostbusters remains one of my all-time favorite movies. I have probably said this on the show a dozen times, and I reserve the right to say it another dozen.

And fittingly, for a list about creations, Ghostbusters gives us one of the great accidental creations in movie history. Gozer tells the Ghostbusters to choose the form of the Destructor, and Ray — sweet, doomed, emotionally defenseless Ray — tries not to think of anything. Which, of course, means his brain immediately betrays him and produces the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

And I sympathize. If an ancient interdimensional god told me not to think of anything, my mind would immediately cough up the stupidest, most embarrassing thing available. That is not Ray’s failure. That is just brain behavior.

But the result is magnificent: the end of the world nearly arrives as a giant, smiling, sailor-suited marshmallow mascot stomping through Manhattan.

What I love is that it takes something harmless from childhood — a comforting corporate cartoon blob designed to sell marshmallows — and turns it into a kaiju. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is technically a manifestation of destruction, but he looks like he should be waving from a Thanksgiving parade float sponsored by diabetes.

And because this is Ghostbusters, there is another creation story behind the creation story. The visual effects were supervised by Richard Edlund, one of the original Industrial Light & Magic heavy hitters, who had worked on the Star Wars films before going out and creating his own effects house, Boss Film Studios. Ghostbusters was one of the company’s first major showcases, and they had to pull off ghosts, proton streams, terror dogs, Gozer, matte paintings, miniatures, optical composites, and a giant marshmallow man on an absolutely absurd timetable.

Ivan Reitman was reportedly not thrilled with the effects, and with all due respect to the late Mr. Reitman, I call bullshit.

Because yes, you can see the seams here and there. Of course you can. But those seams are part of why the movie still feels alive. These effects have texture. They have weight. They have comedy timing. They defined the look of special visual effects for years before CGI came in and sanded everything smooth.

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is a perfect bad creation inside the movie: cosmic horror filtered through snack branding. But outside the movie, he is part of a genuinely great cinematic creation — a team of effects artists inventing a visual language under insane pressure and somehow making the apocalypse look hilarious, tactile, and unforgettable.

3. Dren — Splice

At number three, we have Dren from Splice, the 2009 science-fiction horror film directed by Vincenzo Natali, who previously made Cube, and starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as scientists who keep making decisions that would get most people removed from a laboratory, a university, and possibly society.

Splice asks the timeless scientific question: “What if we did something catastrophically unethical, but we looked sad and serious while doing it?”

In the movie, the scientists are ostensibly trying to push genetic research forward in ways that could lead to medical breakthroughs. Noble enough on paper. But then they decide to splice human DNA into the experiment, create a rapidly developing hybrid organism, conceal it from everyone, and continue making one terrible decision after another until the whole thing becomes less “scientific advancement” and more “lab-grown nightmare with psychosexual consequences.”

Dren is not just a monster. She is the embodiment of every boundary these people crossed while pretending they were still in control. The problem with this creation is not simply that it becomes dangerous. It is that the people who created her never seem emotionally, ethically, or intellectually equipped to deal with what they have made.

And then the movie goes places. Dark places. Weird places. Places where you find yourself thinking, “Remember when this was just about curing disease?”

The creation itself is disturbing, but the real horror is watching the creators keep doubling down after every single warning sign begins flashing red.

2. Soylent Green — Soylent Green

At number two: Soylent Green.

This is the 1973 dystopian science-fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer, starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, and Edward G. Robinson in his final film role. It’s one of those movies where the premise has become so famous that even people who haven’t seen the movie know the punchline — which is unfortunate, because the punchline is cannibalism.

As a creation, Soylent Green is almost unbeatable in its horrible efficiency. The world is overpopulated, resources are collapsing, people are starving, and the solution is apparently to create a mass-produced food product made out of people.

That is a level of dystopian problem-solving that really makes you miss regular incompetence.

The truly awful thing about Soylent Green is that it presents itself as practical. This is not a monster, a weapon, or a mad scientist’s pet project. It is a consumer product. It has branding. It has distribution. It has a place in society. It is horror as supply chain.

And of course, the great final revelation — “Soylent Green is people!” — remains iconic because it turns the entire system into one grotesque closed loop. Humanity has consumed the planet, and now it consumes itself.

Also, as a bonus layer of madness, the real world later gave us an actual meal replacement product called Soylent, which is either brilliant marketing, catastrophic brand awareness, or proof that nobody in a conference room was ever allowed to say, “Maybe the cannibalism movie is not the best association for lunch.”

So yes: Soylent Green is a terrible creation in the movie, and somehow the name itself escaped containment into our world. That alone earns it the number two spot.

1. Skynet — The Terminator Franchise

And at number one, it has to be Skynet.

The Terminator came out in 1984, directed by James Cameron, who was not yet “king of the world” James Cameron, but was absolutely already James Cameron enough to turn a relatively low-budget science-fiction action movie into a film franchise. Arnold Schwarzenegger became instantly iconic as the killer cyborg, Linda Hamilton became Sarah Connor, Michael Biehn played Kyle Reese, and Cameron gave us one of cinema’s great “maybe don’t invent that” cautionary tales.

Because when we talk about bad creations, it is hard to top humanity creating an artificial intelligence system for defense purposes that immediately looks at humanity and says, “Actually, it’s not me, it’s YOU.”

Skynet is the ultimate “we made this to protect us” creation, which is always the exact sentence you hear right before everything goes horribly wrong. It is designed to manage military defense systems, remove human error, respond faster than people can, and make war more efficient. Which is another way of saying humanity built a machine to handle killing and was then shocked when it became extremely good at killing.

What makes Skynet such a perfect number one is that it is not just a dangerous invention. It is an extinction-level self-own. It becomes self-aware, interprets humanity as the threat, triggers nuclear war, and then spends the rest of the franchise sending murder-bots through time to make sure the apocalypse stays on schedule.

That’s commitment.

Skynet is also terrifying because it is not driven by greed, lust, revenge, ego, or marshmallow-based humiliation. It is pure logic curdled into genocide. It is the nightmare version of outsourcing responsibility: humanity creates something to make impossible decisions, and then discovers too late that maybe the ability to make impossible decisions should not be handed to a cold, recursive death calculator with access to missiles.

So, for creating the system that ends the world, invents time-traveling assassins, and proves once and for all that “let the computer handle it” is not always a sound strategic philosophy, Skynet is my number one Bottom Five Creation.

I’m Mike, so I never need notes or make mistakes! :::raspberry sounds:::