On-screen, the characters in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line try their hardest to differentiate themselves, a feat rendered impossible by their circumstances. As we watch the soldiers parade by, they seem little more than an endless stream of generic faces. Conditions have whittled down their names until they sound like four-letter expletives, barked gruffly by commanding officers and friends to whom first names no longer matter.

Based on James Jones' account of his WWI experiences in Guadalcanal, Malick's film quite surprisingly focuses on neither the characters we see, nor the wars they wage. Off-screen, the soldiers' thoughts fade together as though spoken by the same person, their existential musings marked by an uncanny homogeneity.

Malick wants to convince us that these boys aren't just movie stars in makeup, but rugged poet-warriors. He imagines himself a modern-day Homer, using this film as the Iliad he is determined to leave behind. Malick weaves his verse on multiple levels by mixing the haunting grandeur of his images with a stream of almost unintelligible voice-overs as the different soldiers mumble with poetic lethargy.

What we hear are not the thoughts of his characters, but out-of-body musings, as though they are drifting overhead reviewing their past. Perhaps these are their voices at the moment of death, days later in battle or years down the road, as their lives rewind before their eyes. Taken together, their thoughts form an elegiac commentary not so much on war, but humanity's place in nature.

Twenty years ago, Malick all but disappeared from moviemaking after directing Badlands and Days of Heaven, two stunning, soulful films. In both films, the conflicts brought on specific characters are only important insomuch as they relate to their surroundings, a realm constantly suggested but never defined outright.

In The Thin Red Line, Malick pushes his style to an extreme, abandoning almost all attempts at constructing a narrative. Undaunted by the intensity of any moment, Malick feels comfortable wandering off alone through the grass in the midst of a raid. He toys with his audience, building a state of tense anticipation as we expect the enemy to leap from behind the brush, then quickly removing us to a world where actors and soldiers play no part.

Lt. Colonel Tall, Nick Nolte's character, a John Wayne for our generation, gives the film direction when he announces that overwhelming the Japanese forces on a strategic hill could mark a turning point in the war. However, when the men accomplish their mission halfway through the film, the audience loses any sense of what lies ahead.

From then on, characters come and go almost without mention (consider Clooney's last-minute appearance, retained as though part of an awkward attempt to preserve his star billing), and Malick retreats much more frequently from his epic into the tropical universe that engulfs it. The camera becomes increasingly interested in its surroundings, showing us the signs of nature the soldiers overlook as they obliterate everything in their path. The Thin Red Line must be the only war film in which shadows cast by the movement of the clouds take precedence over the mission in progress.

Passing over the ultra-realism of this summer's Saving Private Ryan, Malick minimizes the carnage in his film. In a moment uncharacteristic of war movies but quintessential to his approach, Malick ensures that the casualty we regret most does not belong to one of the young innocents charging blindly into battle. Instead, he singles out a young bird, handicapped by the soldiers' weapons of destruction, as it shudders helplessly in death.

The film's rambling three hours still leaves us with the impression that we could find the answer to our confusion lying somewhere on the editing room floor. In a way, The Thin Red Line feels like a prolonged and moody preview for the eight-hour movie Malick really wanted to make.

The film fails to achieve its purpose not because Malick has no important themes to share (for he does), but because he picked the wrong medium for his epic. Where simplicity seemed to open up the world for our inspection in his previous films, the complexities inherent to a war story merely distract from his message here. For all the unforgettable images this film offers, none strike us as more important that the overlooked fates of its individual characters.