Well-trod ground not even good in its well-trodden-ness

Rating: Null/10 (17 January 1999)

For some reason I saw Apocalypse Now in half of this movie (somehow I wouldn't call it a film). Nick Nolte's first voice-over is highly reminiscent of Captain Willard's bitter ponderings; the jungle scenes could have been Cambodian; and the whole Rousseauean "noble savage" bit was done to death by Coppola -- and with much better success (and isn't it also a big part of Papillon with Steve McQueen?). Not to mention that I seemed to hear that weird kind of Vangelis-style music in a lot of the battle scenes.
Where the movie isn't derivative, it's just plain bad. The amateurish John Boy soliloquizing ("What is love?" &c.) becomes quickly annoying, as does the needless parade of cameos, the quantity of which tend to thin out the already-weak storyline. Potentially interesting characters (Travolta, Cusack) seem to appear and quickly vanish. While this may be in keeping with the random progression of war, it makes for poor storytelling. Movies overly mimetic of the dumb chance and fragmented character of real life are usually bad ones, and TRL is no exception. Like Spielberg in his sub-par war effort, Malick was going after a kind of documentary-quality realism in this story; what he wound up with was an overcrowded, poorly structured marathon, not even worth the free pass I surrendered to see it.
And I'd really like to know why the woman with the baby at the beginning speaks english...