I'd have napped through it but the music was too loud.

Rating: 1/10 (5 February 1999)

On the strength of people telling me it was more than a movie  it was poetry! - I decided to see this movie. What a horrible waste of time and money that decision turned out to be.
After three hours of exquisite (and oddly annoying) boredom, of being pounded by the worst sort of melodramatic drivel, I went away confused, sleepy and wondering if I could get my money back. I suppose the gullible might be persuaded it was art, or poetry, or even good. There was a lot of noise and weird 'nobody-talks-like-that' prose, plenty of nature shots (more on that later), more than enough melodrama, and an almost constant stream of pathetic looking dead stuff. Nevertheless, this movie wasn't poetry, or art, or good  rather it was three badly edited hours extracted at random from six hours of film. Just because something is disjointed, and has no true narrative, does not mean it is poetry. Sometimes if you don't 'get' something, its because there is nothing there to 'get'.
What really bothers me is time that could have been used to develop a story and give depth to the characters was wasted on interminable scenes of frolicking villagers, close-ups of birds (mostly parrots), and face shots of earnest looking actors thinking 'Deep Thoughts'. Does anyone actually think a person in combat is thinking about man's inhumanity to man or frolicking villagers, rather than "I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I'm scared, my feet are cold and I don't want to die"?
I can say I was thinking about man's inhumanity to man by the end of this movie, and how I got suckered into wasting eight bucks. It's too bad really, because I'm sure there was a good movie buried in that six hours of film - but
this wasn't it.
Stay home, clean the garage, watch an infomercial  but don't bother with this movie.