Pretentious, yes... but also harrowing and unusual

Rating: 8/10 (26 September 2003)

Terrence Mallick's unconventional war film is at times almost too harrowing to watch - rarely can a film have more accurately depicted war as a mechanism for taking live people and making dead ones. Mallick's use of music, imagery and voice-overs is hardly subtle, but the overall effect is highly unusual, eschewing conventional narrative to concentrate instead on some very un-Hollywood concerns - the futility of individual valour, and the impossibility of even defining what makes a good man in situations such as these. Well worth watching for all of us fortunate enough never to have been asked to fight for our countries.