So for a while now, I’ve had the feeling that my opinion of Terrence Malick was maybe not one that I should trust. Because yes, when I watched The Thin Red Line, I found it phenomenally dull and unbelievably slow and barely stayed awake through it. But also I was like 20 years old at the time, and it’s more than slightly possible that my tastes have changed over the intervening decades. I figure, maybe I should give him a second shot?

So Badlands is the Malick movie that’s on Filmstruck, and it’s apparently the first one that he ever made. It stars a very young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a pair of casual serial killers, apparently based loosely on Charles Starkweather (who I have only heard of thanks to Billy Joel) and Caril Fugate. So yay, a movie by a director who I might hate about serial killers, my least favorite subject ever, haha whoo. But on the plus side, it’s only 94 minutes, so if it’s terrible, it’ll be short.

But: It was not terrible! In fact… it’s kinda good?

The characters in it are weird, because they’re just really flat of affect. Spacek’s character (who is a 15-year-old girl) is only lightly upset about her boyfriend killing her father, although tbf her dad shot her dog to punish her, so probably she wasn’t super-close to him. Sheen’s character basically acts like a videogame protagonist, where anyone who’s a problem for him gets dealt with by shooting, and he views it as just a practical thing to do with no real moral content. (Apparently, this is somewhat true to the historical people.)

But the movie takes these barely-there people committing murders and makes them interesting basically by super-caring about the places they’re in. From the small town where they live to the forest where they hide out for a while to a mansion where they hole up for a bit to the titular badlands that they drive through at the end, it’s just amazing at conveying the sense of a place, the little details that make it feel real.

Solid movie, and I’ll definitely have to put more Malick stuff on my to-watch list eventually; I definitely don’t trust that old opinion anymore.