"It is perhaps crucial that Malick's film does not end with Bill's death, as he undermines it by following Linda's narrative instead, showing how the repetition begins again as Linda escapes her school for the wheat fields in the final shot, less an ending than a feeling that the reels in the camera have run out. Even in attempting to break out of the repetition, Bill ends up as part of a larger narrative outside himself, temporally dislocated from even the plot of his own film, creates a world wherein this destructive postwar dislocation is more universal, the anxieties present in noir no longer specific to one time or place. His characters see an actual space as somewhere the return to innocence can be achieved, by searching out a land literally set in the past, but it contains the same failures as always: The defiant act instead leads to his own destruction. And through it all, the hint of apocalyptic doom hangs in the air—World War I is on the horizon, and before the farm has burned down, his foreman tells him that the harvests are becoming worse and worse. The flames have stopped, but perhaps they will continue; the innocent girl has escaped into the wild again."

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