Poor movie, very disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (7 February 2001)

After seeing Saving Private Ryan and hearing about Red Line coming in half a year, I looked forward to this movie for more than six months. It not only was a disappointment, it was a genuinely bad movie. I'm all for unique movies, non-linear plots, and intellectual pieces, but this movies was pure art-house crap. It was impossible to care about characters that came and went and never materialized again. It was impossible to tell who was "speaking" during the voice-overs, and what they were saying often made little sense. For a while I wondered if maybe some of it was just over my head, but I talked to many people who felt the same way. We agreed it was UNDER our heads. Several people got up and walked out of the movie. I would have, but I kept thinking (okay...he'll wrap it all up in the end). But he didn't. Malick, after all the hype about his brilliance, ended a poor movie with a poorer ending. The only two characters who'd been central at all so that the viewer could connect with and care about them were Webb and (I forget his name now). One of them dies with a silly grin on his face (Jim Caviezal's character) and the other just disappears. Webb gets a dear-john letter and then we never see him again. All the critic acclaim I heard and read for this movie made me swear off critics once and for all. "Malick is BRILLIANT" they drooled. "The way he poetically juxtaposes the horror of war with the beauty of nature is magnificent!" Yeah...whatever. There were some great shots of nature/warfare colliding...but there was no story. It might as well have been a slide show! Truly one of the worst movies I've ever seen.