Fatal flaw

Rating: 5/10 (29 May 2011)

Before I rant, I will say that this movie has some fantastic sequences. For example, the opening in which two soldiers are living amongst the natives in peace, only to be sucked back into the war. That was very good.
In fact, the entire movie would have been just as perfect and fantastic as everybody says it is if only they had changed one thing; Cast unknown actors instead of big name stars.
For all of its beautiful shots and haunting messages, this film comes very close to be laughable, stupidly, ludicrous. This is due to the endless amounts of COMPLETELY pointless cameos from famous actors scattered all throughout the film. Oh look, there's Sean Pen, oh look, there's Adrien Brody, oh look, there's John Travolta, oh look, there's George Clooney (for thirty seconds). There is no way that the makers of this film thought that doing this would not be a catastrophically large distraction, unless they were utterly clueless. This movie was not meant to have a character driven storyline, I totally understand that. I'm fine with the characters not speaking, not being given objectives, not having personalities or, well, features of any kind for that matter. And this would have worked just fine, if only they had not crammed in every famous actor available to show up on set for a few minutes and just sit there dressed as a soldier, then leave. The only character who comes even close to rising beyond one dimensional is Nick Nolte's.
This does bring up an interesting point though- maybe I'm the one with the problem when viewing this movie. Maybe I'm too familiar with these actors, and thus too expectant when I see so many of them in one war movie together. So perhaps if I were to have watched this without any knowledge of who these actors were, then I would have been able to enjoy the movie's beauty and poetry.
But as it is, this is about the equivalent of casting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dolph Lundgren in Citizen Kane.