How to turn war into porn.

Rating: 4/10 (4 November 2007)

Before it devolves into a remake of Platoon, this movie seems to be going some place interesting. Unlike Spielberg, Malick did find a new way to make a war movie. But Malick's insistent prettiness becomes very distracting, and inappropriate ...and irritating ...and intrusive ...and soporific. Each new gorgeous cutaway makes you mindful that all this self-conscious 'art' is being laid on a few feet thick. You could invent a Terence Malick drinking game to underscore all of his formulaic tics. He seems to constantly be thinking "We can use that really nice (mist shot, tree shot, light filtered through leaves shot, owl shot, lizard shot, bat shot) here. He's not committed to developing an idea about war, or to getting back to the story. He is however very committed to the idea that a viewer cannot go 20 seconds without seeing something pretty.
Two-thirds of what he includes would have been scrapped by a less indulgent director. At one point he starts a skirmish in a dusky, misty wood and a minute later it's sunny and there isn't a tree in sight; best not to waste all that pretty footage he shot. It reaches a point where Malick's own effort at being deep is instead undermined by his visual superficiality. Is everything in the world, no matter how ugly, to be distanced from actual experience by pretty photography? to be converted into a pretty picture? When you make everything so ravishing that a viewer can't look away, you may have made porn.
I don't mind that it corrects the outdated 50s conventions for war movies (as in South Pacific) where there's a single casualty and there's nothing but time to be cheerful & sing. And after watching the dull & flat Tora Tora Tora just before this, I was delighted to see shots not as brightly lit as a suburban living room. But at absolutely no point does this feel like the 1940s. I had to continually remind myself that this wasn't Viet Nam, because it's distractingly filtered through a revisionist post-Nam viewpoint.
Just as in 'Tora Tora Tora' where it seems like no one under 50 was at Pearl Harbor, here only southerners fought WW2. All dialog more than three lines is given to one of innumerable Baptist-raised, home-schooled savants from the deep south who's two words away from some honest deep truth, or some bittersweet, Faulkneresque musing, usually both. I wonder what Malick would do if he was forbidden to fallback on a narrator drawling over a bunch of pseudo-poetic musings. As Carlos Cavagna has noted: "he feels the need to elaborate with voiceovers. Malick is unable to show you what he's trying to convey, so he must tell you." Forget anything resembling high spirits or individualism, these troops have been thoroughly screened so as to compile a full platoon of lost, alienated, anomie-fueled ruminators.
Malick loses the throughline often and the last hour is mush. The 'love-making' scenes that carry one soldier forward are absurd; like something out of a romance novel or a perfume commercial, not the grubby, efficient screwing that's more likely part of the life of some back woods southern boy.
Is it a better movie than I could make? Profoundly so. Is it better than Hollywood can make? Emphatically. Is it better than Malick can make? Unfortunately, no. This is a film-maker who is fussily pulling strings to get you to declare him a genius, not someone making art.