Badlands (1973) Review
Badlands (1973) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Malick's first film takes a real killing spree and narrates it in the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl who describes murder in the vocabulary of a movie magazine. The…
Actor: Martin Sheen
Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack at thirty-six during the Apocalypse Now shoot and completed the film afterward. The opening hotel room scene, in which he punches a mirror, was genuinely drunk and the blood is real.
Badlands is the earlier performance and the more controlled one, playing a killer with no interior life at all, opposite Sissy Spacek’s narration.
He is at least as known for The West Wing, and for a long record of political arrest, having been detained dozens of times at protests.
His sons Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen both act, and he has worked with both, including in The Way, which Estevez directed and which is the warmest thing either has made.
