war is hell, but poetry is heller

Rating: 6/10 (16 December 2006)

An interesting film, but it's based on a rhetorical trick. War is such a hellish experience that the only thing that can make it bearable is the comradry of soldiers, the sense that their platoon, company, unit, is acting as a group, that they are looking out for one another. Of course, this is to some extent an illusion, but it makes the experience bearable. What Malick does is strip away any sense of being part of a group. The poetry, and the rendering of the inner experience  and most often doubt; Malick never allows his soldiers to feel they are doing the right thing or to allay those doubts  acts very quickly to reduce the soldiers to collections of isolated individuals. Naturally, under such conditions, the experience of war completely overwhelms them, thus making those doubts seem more valid, or rather, disallowing the possibility of any other way of looking at things.
So, yeah, it's a good film, but it's by no means a great one. And once you realize that the poeticization is not only a bit of a rhetorical cheat, but also loaded against anything other than one way of viewing the experience, then the whole thing reduces to a propaganda exercise. The clearest indication that this is the case is in the fake utopia of the native people, everybody being nice and organic and environmentally conscious, which is, at best, a naive view. Prehistoric humans had wars just as we do, they simply lacked the destructive means with which technology endows us. The way Malick sets it up, however, he tries to make it seem as if war is the property of civilization, rather than something inherent in human life per se. Again, it's a rhetorical cheat, and a cheap one too.