There are a variety of takes on the artistry, meaning, and overall 'worth' of
Tree of Life. Notably, the simultaneous boos and cheers when it screened at the Cannes film festival (and subsequently went on to win the Palm D'Or) or alternatively
Kurt's review vs.
Greg's review on this site. One thing we can all agree on is the majesty and scope of Douglas Trumbull's effects work (still using extensive analogue methodology instead of CGI overkill) in the film which is making a play to raise the bar on the man's own work in
2001: A Space Odyssey. If you just want a taste of the near 30 minutes of the creation of the universe as envisioned in
Tree of Life, look no further than the clip below.
"We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be," Trumbull told the moviemaking website. "It was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn't have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic."
Via WIRED