Cinematic Sominex--the WORST war film ever made!

Rating: 1/10 (25 February 2000)

Like "Saving Private Ryan", this movie is set in WWII, it's almost three hours long, has exceptional cinematography, and focuses on the travails of the regular infantrymen during that conflict.
Unlike "Saving Private Ryan", this film is a SUPER-BORING, PRETENTIOUS piece of GARBAGE. It spends so much effort trying to be poetic and lyrical and elegiac that it never gets around to anything even close to resembling a cohesive storyline or character development.
I've developed three film rules from viewing this thing:
1. Never use more than one voice for voice-over narration. There's so much voice-over in this flick (and most of it in hushed delivery) that I thought they must be compensating for REALLY bad on-set sound recording.
2. When you have to sit through 42 MINUTES of a war film before you hear any gunfire or artillery, you know you're in trouble.
3. Any movie with Woody Harrelson in the cast should be avoided like the plague. (This includes his work on one of the most overrated TV series of all time, "Cheers".)
I also have serious issues with a war film which attempts to put a positive spin on a lead character who is an AWOL-prone coward who should have been shot by his own superiors.
The reason this movie got seven Oscar nominations (thankfully winning none) is because of this inbred Hollywood thing about the writer-director, Terrence Malick, a J.D. Salinger-wannabe who directed two films in the 1970s (the not-bad "Badlands" and another beautiful-boring-overrated flick, "Days Of Heaven"), then became a recluse, refusing interviews and photographs, etc. In fact, at the Oscars, when the Best Director nominees were announced, instead of the usual "director-in-action" clip shown for the others, they could only show an empty director's chair with Malick's name on the back.
As far as I'm concerned, Malick can retreat back to the obscurity he deserves. This is the worst Best Picture contender I've seen since "Braveheart", and the worst war film since Ollie Stone's propagandistic "Born On The Fourth Of July."
The ONLY reason this movie rates even a 1 is for the cinematography.