This guy's bag of tricks are old hat by now. Maybe he should actually surprise us all and go back to, say, Badlands and make a movie that actually follows a screenplay.
Did anyone ever hear that interview Daniel Schweiger did with James Horner about 15 years ago? Horner was extremely unfiltered in that interview when discussing Malick, who he basically thought was nuts.
Horner regarded the cut of The New World he was given to score as randomly paced, and essentially shapeless as a narrative. Horner even hired his own editors to cut sequences into something he could write music to.
When Malick's cutters viewed the sequences Horner had prepared for himself, they thought they worked great and tried to persuade Malick to go with those and edit the rest of the film with this more coherent architecture. Malick initially agreed -- but finally decided the more random, "free form" cut he showed to Horner was the one he preferred.
Horner echoed the sentiments of many other people about Malick's equally random and arbitrary use of classical "needle drops", including the Indian skirmish which was tracked with a Mozart piano concerto.
Horner also added that he found Malick an emotionless person, who couldn't depict scenes of sentiment or love "because he doesn't feel those feelings."
I think that interview was taken down -- probably due to Horner's controversial comments (I searched for it again a few years ago but could not find it). Hopefully it will resurface one day. It was really was one of of the most interesting composer interviews ever.