Drawing comparisons with Citizen Kane on its release, this still
stands up as an amazingly poetic debut for director Terrence Malick.
Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are both on astonishingly supple and
sensitive form as the killers on the run (it's loosely based on the
Starkweather/Fugate massacres in 1950s Nebraska). Sheen
demonstrates the dangerousness of movie iconography - his character
is an obsessive, alienated James Dean clone - while Spacek is
completely believable as his retarded girlfriend. True Romance
(which even reprises its music), Natural Born Killers and Kalifornia,
among many other films, owe a heavy debt to it.
