The film's Best Picture and Best Director nominations were a pleasant surprise, but the lack of a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Brad Pitt is a bit of a shame, with the lack of nomination for Best Visual Effects being even more incomprehensible.
The overdue Emmanuel Lubezki had practically swept the awards season for his gorgeous cinematography, yet lost the Oscar in an upset to Robert Richardson for Hugo.
Critical Dissonance: Despite winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 and being one of the most well received films of that year by critics (and going far beyond that, with some even calling it one of the best films of the decade), the film also earned a significant backlash from mainstream audiences. For example, the Rotten Tomatoes score on the audience's side is barely at 60% while critics is at a very healthy 84%. General consensus on the negative side of the spectrum seems to be that the film is pretentious and deliberately incomprehensible, attempting to lend gravity on a cosmic scale to earthly subjects that many consider almost inherently boring.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Mrs. O'Brien, in a role that helped propel Jessica Chastain (along with other performances in a very prolific 2011) from relative unknown to indie film royalty.
Nightmare Fuel: While most of the Creation sequence is absolutely breathtaking, it becomes very unsettling towards the end. The sequence starts with serene, peaceful images of stars and nebulae after the Big Bang—but once Earth is formed, it gradually segues to the birth of life, with all the predatory savagery that comes with it. In quick succession, we see a snarling plesiosaurus lurking on a beach, a school of hammerhead sharks shown in silhouette, and finally a dinosaur nearly crushing its rival's head in a riverbed. It serves as a chilling reminder that not all life is friendly.
Spiritual Successor: The film deals with many of the same themes and ideas as Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain from a few years prior, and its narrative and visual style has a few parallels to it. Notably, a major plot point in that film involves a character searching for...the Tree of Life.
Tear Jerker: Terrence Malick is usually known for emotionally distant films, making it all the more surprising that this is the closest he's gone to outright tear-jerker mode.
Visual Effects of Awesome: "Awesome" doesn't even come close to describing it. Douglas Trumbull, VFX artist from 2001: A Space Odyssey was dragged out of retirement because Malick didn't like what modern CGI artists were doing (or more accurately: modern CGInote although the Nature and Astral Realms were realized through this method via Prime Focus and Double Negative VFX respectively). Even Brad Jones, who spent over a half hour bashing the film, thought the visuals were flawless.
Archive Panic: Out of all the tree games, this one is the most likely to induce fear from its sheer amount of content. It has received over 400 patches with 25 layers to get through, which will take at least a week of total game time, and even the first layer is split into multiple minigames that take a while to complete (and buying one squares the cost of the other). And once you have finished the main game, there's always extreme mode with even more content to get through.
Catharsis Factor: For many pre-v2.023 players, the Humans layer felt like a total slog because of its slowness and repetitive content. After that patch came out, the addition of a Bulk button and various boosts from Researchers made running through a large chunk of that layer again at blazing speed an immensely satisfying task.
Funny Moments: The achievement One Hundred and Seventy-six reads "Get a life :(". To actually reach that point, you'd have to play for more than a day and still be really far from actually finishing the game, so chances are that you do need to get a life.
Prior to v.0.017, bulk purchasing made it possible to have more than 5000 color levels/B buyables.
By clicking to reset for Plants when they reset nothing fast enough, it's possible to build up an exorbitant amount of them. Lessened once the game makes those amounts less insane and eventually fixed.
Scrappy Mechanic: The Human layer's milestones and later upgrades do not give a full effect, only giving incremental amounts of effects at set amounts of Plants/Thoughts/Humans, essentially making them sub-milestones. What makes this an irritating mechanic in an otherwise-enjoyable game is that each sub-milestone requires actively purchasing buyables for a considerable amount of time, often requiring a substantial amount of waiting and thus padding out the length of the node.
Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The Minigame tab has a typing minigame and the Stem Cells layer has a Micro tab. Neither of those do anything, but since the former is a chance to flex your typing skill and the latter is a full-fledged tab with buyables and upgrades, it's all too easy to forget about the main game to take care of them (the latter mostly if you forgot it existed for a while and before you get upgrades that autobuy buyables).
The first run-through of Minigame D (the Car minigame) is rather boring and tedious yet requires nearly-constant input, requiring you to buy from several upgrades while also clicking to refuel the car. It takes quite a long while to complete this stage.
The Taxonomy layer is an absolute slog to get through, both before and after it's split from the "Animals" layer. Before the split, having to click on each Gene node to upgrade it is incredibly slow and monotonous (and automation of this layer isn't unlocked for a long time). After the split, there are achievements that, when achieved, grant you necessary upgrades to progress. The only problem is that most of these achievements require you to have a very specific number of levels on most of the Gene nodes and without each number exceeding a certain value (i.e. "17 nodes must have a prime/composite number of levels less than X"). Not only must the nodes be clicked in an extremely precise order, but if you accidentally double-click one of them and go over the limit, you must reset the nodes and try again. And you may not even realise that the achievement is unobtainable at the current point in the game unless you try (which requires resetting the nodes and having to buy back all the upgrades you reset on).
Getting through the Species layer overall is neither difficult nor needs constant clicking, but what makes it infuriating is that most of the layer involves massive timewalls, with it taking on average hours to reach the next upgrade or milestone, and despite the presence of challenges for boosts they barely help with the pain since they also need you to push the Species amount as far as possible before you have a chance at another completion.
The Humans layer is especially tedious when each milestone's and the later upgrades' effects are basically split into sub-milestones where you need to wait for Thoughts to accumulate so that you can purchase buyables and get Plants/Thoughts/Humans above the milestone count. There's also a whopping 100 milestones, not counting in the sub-milestones for most of them, and the time it takes to reach each sub-milestone is noticeably long, causing it to be a rather long slog. Thankfully, once you're past the last milestone, there are some challenges to break up the monotony and progress feels faster in general. V2.023 also helped speed it up a lot with the "Bulk" feature that bulks all buyables and grants fifty seconds of Thought production with a single click.
