 What wouldn't the author say of Malick?
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. 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? 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 a meditation on the existence of God. After an Edenic prelude, in which a boyishly idealistic absent without leave soldier, Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel), swims with native youths to the accompaniment of a heavenly children's choir, the first part sees the arrival of the Allied forces on the island, introduces the principal characters (none of whom amounts to a genuine protagonist), and lays out the movie's geographical and philosophical terrain. The centerpiece--the fighting--goes on for over an hour and features the most frantic and harrowing sequences, chiefly the company's initially unsuccessful frontal assault on a Japanese hilltop bunker. In the final shot, a twisted tree grows on the waterline of the beach, the cycle of life beginning anew. The Thin Red Line has a curious sound-scape, as the noise of battle frequently recedes to make room for interior monologues and Hans Zimmer's bump-bump, minimalist New Age music.
 he told a well-rounded story of war
 he knows how to bring out the beauty amongst war  he told a well-rounded story of war  he's a philosophical thinker  he did more than just make a war movie