more than a film, a self-examination

Rating: 10/10 (4 January 1999)

Without going to Kantian philosophical lengths to explain my deep abiding love for this film, I will simply speak about the two shots which I found the most important in the film.
The opening shot is a medium close-up on an crocodile as it slowly descends into a murky swamp. In context of the Edenic sequence afterwards with Private Witt, this sets up the entire movie. Man has gone from peaceful cohabitant with nature into baleful warrior, the evil lurking underneath the surface, separated by a thin line between the water level. Later on near the end of the film the troops capture a dead croc in Guadalcanal. Danger has turned to decay; Nature has crawled back into the earth to die.
The most powerful moment for me, however, was the scene just before the battle is to begin, before any shot has been fired. Several of the soldiers are wordlessly marching toward the enemy, marching toward their death, and in a long wide shot a Melanesian native walks in the other direction, calmly, quietly, eventually passing the soldiers entirely. They look at the native with utter bewilderment. The pure insanity of juxtaposition between this pivotal moment in the lives of the soldiers and a native on a walk in the jungle brings war, humanity, progress, civilization, life, death, and spiritual meaning into question without saying a word. I defy Spielberg, or for that matter anyone, to approach such brilliance.
This is a mediatation on the essential oneness of man, a sobering portrait about the inevitability of evil, and a maddening glimpse of the natural world we can no longer have for ourselves. Leave the star cameos out of it. Forget the unconventional narrative. Watch the first living art on celluloid in years without the bias of hundreds of films' worth of experience. And be ahead of the curve, because in twenty years this film will take its rightful place among the best ever.