A Cinemactic Rorschash

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 1999)

This seems to have become a forum for the most rabid admirers of the Spielberg/SPR camp directing their antipathy towards TTRL with a vengeance & vehemence & venom I've never encountered directed toward another film before. Personally, I don't see how the two films can be compared. They need not be mutually exclusive, either; in fact, I think they complement each other. Whereas one aimed for a realistic depiction of war, the other strove for an IMPRESSIONISTIC look at war. Whereas Spielberg meant his film to be tribute to the American veterans of WWII, Malick's film wanted to explore what war does to men.(The film suggests that it turns most men "into dogs". The vignette showing two stray dogs feasting on corpses of fallen soldiers --"dog eat dog", as it were--is brilliant.)
Of course, one can argue there are more evil things in this world than war itself(Genocide & the possibility of the world being ruled by the Axis powers, to name a couple.). Although the film differs from the book in many details, Malick was faithful to the latter's overall message. As Jones states in his bitterly sacastic Dedication:
"This book is cheerfully dedicated to those greatest and most heroic of human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE; may they never cease to give us pleasure, excitement and adrenal stimulation that we need, or provide us with the heroes, the presidents and leaders, the monuments and museums which we erect to them in the name of
PEACE."
As Kaylie Jones, the author's surviving daughter said of TTRL:
"It's not a movie that you walk away from thinking, 'Isn't it nice that those heroic soldiers died for a good cause.' You walk away with a hole in your stomach that stays for days. In that sense, it's true to the book.There is bravery and heroism, but the whole idea that it is for a great cause is not there at all."
Contrast that to what she thinks her father would think of SPR:
"He would have been, I think, very happy with that first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. After that, I think he would have been very disappointed with the rest of the film. I think it is the antithesis of what he believed war films should be about. His notion of war films in general was that they were phony. The public wants to believe that war is valor and that individual human sacrifice is not for naught. He believed the opposite. I think that Saving Private Ryan is just the same thing as all those other films.

That is why Malick's film has no real heroes(although some characters did perform feats of heroism.). Which is also why Malick's film(despite big studio backing) is perhaps the most anti-Hollywood war film ever made.
Although TTRL does have several explicit messages, it is es- sentially a cinematic Rorschash where you get out of it as much as you put into it. Obviously, reading a poem requires more from the reader than, say, reading a comic book. Both are examples of the print medium, but each requires a different level of reading. Same thing with movies. SPR worked on one level, TTRL worked on another.
If TTRL wasn't for you, then it wasn't for you. Yet I find it interesting that many of the major complaints directed at TTRL were also the very ones directed at an earlier cinematic Ror- schash--Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which is now universally recognized as one of the greatest films in the history of the medium. How much "character development" is in THAT film?...How much "plot"? Both a commercial & critical failure when it first premiered, how many people do you suppose walked out of THAT film?