The fact that this masterpiece is being compared to Saving Private Ryan really pisses me off. Saving Private Ryan exploited the violence of the war to the point in which it becomes this silly Faces of Death voyeuristic feeling of watching graphic violence without a conscience. Terrence Mallick embraced the violence by keeping it nearly bloodless and more dramatic. Steven Spielberg made SPR just so he can have another Oscar to cram up his pretentious ass while Mallick had a deeper meaning. He explored pacifism, nature, and the meaning of life in an attempt to bring out a sort of Zen-like state of mind in the viewer.
War truly is terrible and it does terrible things to people living it.
And the pictures painted in this movie do show that, but I stopped gasping for breath quite early. A certain amount of shock value would have been enough, but it shouldn't have been made the carrying force of this movie. In the end I found TRL boring. This is what books are for. This was a movie that took us inside the head of several soldiers and showed us how the war affected each one of them.