Pretentious tripe of a film.

Rating: 1/10 (9 April 2008)

Less than five minutes in and this film had disappeared entirely up its own a**hole. I've never seen a more pretentious, indirect attempt at making something seem so much more important than it actually was. When you boil it down, the movie was merely trying to say what a thousand other movies have said - war is bad. The problem is that the movie goes about saying it in these smug, overblown, misguided little verbal vignettes that sounded more like Gomer Pyle deconstructing Nietzsche with a butter churn than the profound statements the conceited writers of this film tried to make them out to be. These simple soldiers would have conveyed much more emotion by just saying things directly like men of this caliber would say in real life - ironically much like the direct route they were ordered to take up that first hill on the island.
Don't even get me started on the "performances". So many of my favorite actors here, thrown away and reduced in a pathetic sea of stilted dialogue and hackneyed action scenes. They make attempt after vainglorious attempt to make you feel empathy for these characters without actually laying any of the groundwork to justify it. The movie was chaos. It tried to "firework" into all these little sub-stories held together by a common, overriding theme yet only attempted to support that huge endeavor by randomly injecting celebrity roles instead of concentrating on a solid story that actually builds upon itself and makes the viewer emotionally attached to at least ONE character. Abandoned story leads, no quantifiable discernment of narrative along with random scenes with clearly different filmed elements made it even more patchwork.
If you enjoyed this movie I truly feel sorry for the people in your social circle.