Mesmerizing

Rating: Null/10 (8 March 2001)

Superb film, made with a dreamlike quality, which contains intense combat. The film emphasizes the utter fear of combat very, very well. Before the soldiers even land at Guadalcanal, there is much screen time devoted simply to capturing the fear in their faces. This carries over to when they're on the battlefield, too. And you really feel like you are experiencing combat. It's terrifying.
In the meantime, the film presents voiceovers of several characters, representing their interior thoughts and emotions about what they're doing and what they're thinking. It's remarkable that a film of such great scale (hundreds of soldiers in the frame at once; huge battle scenes) could at the same time have such an interior, meditative quality.
The film is also strong in presenting combat as a part of nature, as part of the natural cycles of life and death. We are all living things on this planet, the film seems to say, and even though war is a man-made event, it nonetheless happens, and we live and die like other creatures.
On the one hand, this is the most expensive art movie ever made! On the other, it is a beautiful poem of a movie which presents gripping combat sequences while managing to stay true to its powerful, antiwar feeling. Try to see this on the big screen if at all possible. It really loses a lot on TV.
I also must commend Hans Zimmer on his excellent score. It perfectly captures the strange, dreamlike quality of the movie as a whole. It is one of the most haunting and beautiful scores I've ever heard. (And it was used in a PEARL HARBOR trailer.)