input: Text: War and Pieces No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick's return to cinema after 20 years. I've sat through it twice and am still trying to sort out my responses, which run from awe to mockery and back. Like Saving Private Ryan, the picture wallops you in the gut with brilliant, splattery battle montages and Goyaesque images of hell on earth. But Malick, a certified intellectual and the Pynchonesque figure who directed Badlands and Days of Heaven in the 1970s and then disappeared, is in a different philosophical universe from Steven Spielberg. Post-carnage, his sundry characters philosophize about their experiences in drowsy, runic voice-overs that come at you like slow bean balls: "Why does nature vie with itself?... Is there an avenging power in nature, not one power but two?" Or "This great evil: Where's it come from? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us, robbin' us of life and light?" First you get walloped with viscera, then you get beaned by blather. Those existential speculations don't derive from the screenplay's source, an archetypal but otherwise down-to-earth 1962 novel by James Jones (who also wrote From Here to Eternity ) about the American invasion of the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. They're central to Malick's vision of the story, however, and not specious. In the combat genre, the phrase "war is hell" usually means nothing more than that it's a bummer to lose a limb or two, or to see your buddy get his head blown off. A true work of art owes us more than literal horrors, and Malick obliges by making his theater of war the setting for nothing less than
  Question: Who is the least lovable character in The Thin Red Line?
  
   (A) Private Bell
   (B) Lieutenant Colonel Tall
   (C) Captain Staros
   (D) Seargant Welsh
  Answer:
output: Lieutenant Colonel Tall