Two camps or Where's the Hollywood exec when you need him?

Rating: 6/10 (31 January 1999)

Sometimes directors get so great everyone is afraid to edit their "masterpieces".
Reading the other commentators, I see two camps: I didn't get/how could you not get it.
I think I got it. I saw the movie basically as a commentary on the paradox of nature as both beautiful and cruel. Take the Eden-like first scene and the symbolic nature of that one soldier's perfect beautiful "good" wife. Later in the movie, both idealizations of nature turn out to be false. The "good" wife turned bad reminded me of Conrad's one symbolic female character in Heart of Darkness turned on its head.
Basically, nature vs. man is a false dichtomy
Nature as paradise via Theocritus versus nature as wilderness via the Bible, another false dichotomy.
In Hegalian terms, what is the synthesis? What is the true view of nature? Can it be expressed with words, or only imagery and poetry? Sorry for the intellectual allusions, but I think this is where the movie was going.
What is nature and what is man's place in it? Tough questions, Malick has no answers. Unfortunately he spent three hours on it. Meaningless dialogue and pseudo-intellectual babble use up at least an hour of screen as the movie never ends.
Within this quagmire of crap is an astounding battle scene, a brilliant performance by Nick Nolte, amazing cinematography, some half-developed fascinating themes.
Like the last 45 minutes of Apocalapse Now, this movie was too ambitious. If the director would have just saved face, cut the hour of crap, the movie would have been just as profound, more entertaining, just as ambigious in a good way, and well, just plain awesome.
What a waste of potential. There really was a masterpiece hidden in there. To think, the irony is -- if the film had the discipline of commercialism it would have made better art.