f64154c0_ties_in_Malick_s_Films__Part_I__Badlands
[Image] FAMILY [Days of Heaven] Bill and Linda are brother and sister. Bill and Abby pose as brother and sister. Family portraits hang in the Farmer's house. Abby tells Linda about her lack of family--being "all alone in the world" when she was a child. The Farm Foreman tells Bill, "he's [the Farmer] like a son to me." [The Thin Red Line] A Melanesian mother and child cook; a father plays with a child as Witt looks on. Witt's first words are, "I remember my mother when she was dying." Staros in voice over says, "You [his men] are my sons." The voice over when Witt visits the village that shuns him states, "We were all a family. How'd we come apart?" New commanding officer Bosche at the end of the film tells the men the company is a family and, "I am the father. Guess that makes Sergeant Welsh the mother. Father is head, mother runs it." [Badlands] 
Holly lives with her father until his death and mentions her mother twice (how she died, and she says in voice over, "I wonder where'd I'd be right now if my mother had never died").
Similarities in Malick's Films, Part I
Badlands