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Heidegger sees human "dwelling" as fourfold: saving the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the divinities, and escorting mortals. In layman's terms: to dwell is to be stuck between earth and heaven, aware of one's eventual mortality and looking for divine redemption. Malick visualizes this in his constant upward-searching camera shots. We are aware of the sky and a concealed deity by looking up at the birds in the vast blue, or by feeling its distance in the rays of sun filtering through a canopy of trees. "Man, as man," Heidegger wrote, "has always measured himself with and against something heavenly" ("Poetically, Man Dwells").

John Smith (Colin Farrell) looks to 'exchange this false life for a true one.'

The skyward looking and longing for a seemingly distant God is a reoccurring motif in Malick's films. The New World is very much preoccupied with the presence of God and his gift of "the promised land" of America. John Smith (portrayed by Colin Farrell) and the Virginian settlers hoped for a peaceful, bountiful Eden in which they could start over and, as Smith says, "exchange this false life for a true one." But when the Jamestown colony quickly falls on hard times, Smith prays for redemption: "Lord, we have gone away from you … let us not be brought to nothing." For the settlers and natives, who clash and suffer the birthing pains of a new nation, God seems quite distant, and hope seems naïve. However, amid the squalor and cannon-fire of a fallen Eden, paradise is just beyond the mountains, in "the land that has no end."

Malick understands something that many Christian filmmakers do not—that we can redeem our broken existence in part by seeing in the very lack of goodness some evidence of an ultimate good. In his essay, "What Are Poets For?", Heidegger speaks of this ability of art to capture what is holy amid a world so plagued by evil: "To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. That is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy."

In his cinematic envisioning of life on the brink, Malick performs such poetic duties. Each of Malick's films can be characterized as somber, elegiac meditations on life amid the "world's night," and yet therein Malick manages to glimpse the "fugitive gods." His films are the best and worst of times, with moments of transcendent glory and beauty existing in harmony with reminders of life's temporality and destitution. Much of the first half of World features the poetry of a passionate, ephemeral, Adam & Eve romance (between Smith and Pocahontas), a feeling of paradise soon-to-be lost that is mirrored in the classic Badlands scene in which Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen dance in the cold prairie darkness to Nat King Cole: "The dream has ended / for true love died / the night a blossom fell / and touched two lips that lied."

Indeed, if there is one expressly biblical motif that continually drives Malick, it is the question of a perfect Eden. His films represent a yearning for that peaceful goodness that was originally given us—the wholeness that can now only be glimpsed in traces of something missing. The characters in The Thin Red LineLine constantly seek this place: "How do we get to that distant shore?" one soldier asks. Another thinks he's found that place on leave away from battle: "Walked into the golden age. Stood on the shores of a new world … "

Searching for the "new world" is an unfulfilled quest in the films of Malick, and remains so with the aptly titled The New World, where he again explores the questions of harmony and Eden: Can man, so divided by his own sin nature, ever live together on this earth as in the beginning? John Smith ponders it with optimism ("We shall make a new start—a fresh beginning—where the blessings of earth are bestowed upon all"), as does Christopher Plummer's Captain Newport ("We have escaped the Old World and its bondage … God has given us a promised land"), but the film ultimately leaves the questions unanswered, the hope unfulfilled.

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