To The Wonder Trailer Is Every Bit The Terrence Malick Movie You'd Expect

Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams in To the Wonder
(Image credit: Redbud Pictures)

Here’s the first trailer for Terrence Malick’s new movie To the Wonder. It stars Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams as a couple who meet a priest in Oklahoma and renew ties with childhood friends. At least that’s the official line. In practice, if you’d told me this was Tree of Life 2 before I watched this trailer, I’d have made it all the way through and still believed you.

To the Wonder isn’t a sequel to Tree of Life, but it is very Malicky. Here’s the trailer…

Malick is, as always, a love him or hate him filmmaker. Personally I couldn’t get past Javier Bardem’s narration, which seems to consist mostly of a combination of bad clichés and pseudo-intellectual claptrap said with enough sincerity and grandeur to make it seem profound. I’m going to assume, however, that if you bothered to click play on the above To the Wonder trailer you are a Malick fan and probably feel differently. I won’t hold it against you.

To the Wonder arrives in theaters on April 12, 2013. It’s only 111 minutes long which is, incidentally, incredibly short for a Terrence Malick film. Critics both loved and hated it in nearly equal measure when it debuted in September at the Toronto film festival, which unlike the running time, is exactly in line with what you’d expect from a movie made by the mind behind The New World.

Love the trailer and think I’m a culturless troll? You’re probably right. Tell me off in the comments below.

Josh Tyler