 What wouldn't the author say of Malick?
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. 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. He speaks the movie's epitaph, "Darkness and light, strife and love: Are they the workings of one mind, the feature of the same face? Malick puts a lot of shining things on the screen: soldiers, natives, parrots, bats, rodents, visions of Eden by way of National Geographic and of the Fall by way of Alpo.
 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