The men of C Company have been ordered to take Hill 210 on Guadalcanal to secure an airbase for the U.S. in the Pacific Theater of WWII. The film loosely centers on Private Witt (Jim Caviezal), an undisciplined but fervent soldier.
Words cannot express how much I hated this movie. I have only seen one Terrence Malick film before and I hated that one so much, I just fast-forwarded through chunks of it. The fast-forward button was also my friend here, but this at least had more going on than Tree of Life.
It did launch a number of careers. Anybody who was anybody in the 00s was probably in this movie, including Adrien Brody, Toby Kebbell, John C. Reilly, Jared Leto, Dash Mihok, and Caviezal. Veterans like John Cusack, Nick Nolte, John Travolta, Sean Penn, and Elias Koteas round out the stacked cast, as Malick works very hard to pretend there were no Black people at Guadalcanal.
Aside from the obvious racism in casting, there's the added squick of Christian colonialism as Witt is shown to be hiding amongst the natives at the beginning in an idyllic, Eden-like harmony, only to be thrust roughly back into the blood and carnage of war. Said natives only make another appearance near the end, riddled with disease and doing manual labor for the Americans.
Likewise, there's only one speaking part for a woman (two lines in a voiceover) in a series of hazily lit, beatific flashbacks that only exist to show how melancholy a male character is. It's reductive and lazy, with extended pseudo-philosophical internal monologues, and long static shots of nature. Skip it and watch an Attenborough documentary instead.
But if you must, it's currently streaming on Starz, which I get through Amazon Prime.
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