The Father Nature of film

While hardly prolific, Malick more than compensates with an utter mastery of his craft.  His films are singularly stunning: technically flawless and seamlessly compiled. With help from such visual masters as Emmanuel Lubezki and John Toll, Malick's works are gorgeous to behold — even when the results are gruesome, as when perfect Steadicam shots transport you along for a carnage-filled creep through the grasses of Guadalcanal.

And while less renowned than counterparts like Stanley Kubrick or Francis Ford Coppola, Malick has effectively launched film careers (Sheen and Spacek's, notably) and can easily attract the industry's most talented actors, most of whom will endure anything to work for the man.

His films are also unrepentantly intellectual, which may be why many bits of Malick's artistry end up rehashed in lesser Hollywood fare. Not only did "True Romance's" Tony Scott lift haunting, sweet xylophone strains of Carl Orff's "Gassengauer" from "Badlands," but Quentin Tarantino essentially hoisted the whole story, even a portion of Spacek's narrative. (In fact, "Badlands" spawned an entire knock-off genre of killer-on-the-road movies, "Kalifornia," "Doom Generation" and "Natural Born Killers" among them.)

What no knockoff can capture is Malick's endless fascination with that tension between man and the outside world — never more clearly displayed than in "Thin Red Line."

Though putatively a war movie, the battle in "Line" between U.S. infantry and their mostly unseen Japanese foes is a sideshow. Malick's real purpose was to explore the very nature of battle — how human conflict not only destroys its participants but the world around it. "What is this war in the heart of nature?" asks one narrator at the film's very start. Endless, jarring shots of artillery shells blasting away ridgetops signal Malick's curiosity about war's devastating impact on the natural world, how the human struggle for supremacy is the most unnatural of acts. Consider Sean Penn's First Sgt. Welsh, whose cynicism leads him to quietly pull soldier after soldier away from the front. Observing the carnage, he simply concludes, "Property. The whole ... thing's about property."

Why else would two AWOL soldiers at the film's beginning be hiding among peaceful (and devoutly Christian) Melanesian natives? Why else do troops encounter a oblivious Solomon Islander wandering away from the battlefield as they slog toward it?  It is Malick's romcom-era rewrite of Rousseau's "noble savage" proposition.

Contemplating evil
"The New World" travels in similar territory, though sometimes more subtly. (Sometimes too subtly; the first hour and a half falters on endless narrative breaks and sluggish pacing.) The contrast between English explorers and native tribes is Malick's obvious point of reference, but he unfurls it in brilliantly subtle ways — perhaps none more so than when the door to the British fort is pulled open and the frame transitions from the lush green outside to a dead, grey, muddy world inside, where the sailors are dying and nothing grows. And it defines the film's most stunning shot, when one of Pocahontas' tribesman on a visit to England stares with silent puzzlement at a sculpted tree in a Renaissance garden.

Human insolence is also on Malick's mind.  Blind pride virtually seeps from the mouth of "New World's" Capt. Newport (Christopher Plummer) as he tells his charges, "God has given us a promised land, a great inheritance" — a clear contrast to Pocahontas' words for John Smith shortly after: "You have no evil. I belong to you."  Such unintended malice enfolds Sheen's nihilistic, fame-obsessed killer Kit, whose life is guided by his own insane rules of engagement. ("With lawmen it would've been different. They were out there to get a job done and they deserved a fair chance.")

Yet as much as Malick's films rely on this fundamental tension created by the primal conflict, he never quite resolves it. Perhaps his best effort comes at the end of "New World," when John Smith fills with remorse as he eventually realizes his natural woman has been lost to British civility. "I thought it was a dream, what we knew in the forest," he says. "It seems it's the only truth."

A truth, Malick seems to keep saying, most often found in the grass.

After seven years, MSNBC.com lifestyle editor Jon Bonné is still trying to decode "The Thin Red Line."

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