“What’s this war in the heart of nature?”

Terrence Malick’s camera glides low to the ground through fields of tall grass in the hills of Guadalcanal for the bulk of The Thin Red Line as American soldiers slowly advance toward an unseen Japanese enemy during World War II. The grass envelops and shrouds the soldiers, overtaking the composition of many of the film’s frames. Nature both protects and constricts them, blocking their view and shielding them from their enemy. Explosions and smoke erupt in the hills as each faction tries to kill the other. We see these effects in fragments above the grass, from the point of view of the camera within it.

Nature is as much a focus as war during these battle scenes. In the heat of conflict, Malick cuts away to beautiful shots of the island and its swaying fields of grass. As soldiers rush forward up a hill on foot, guns in hand, a butterfly crosses the frame from right to left. As soldiers army crawl through the grass toward their enemy, a snake slithers angrily toward them. Elsewhere, in another shot, a wounded baby bird struggles to fly away. After the battle, Malick lingers for a disturbingly long time on dogs eating the corpses of fallen men.

“Look at this jungle. Look at the vines, the way they twine around the trees, swallowing everything,” the brash Lt. Col. Gordon Tall tells Capt. Staros after they secure the hill. “Nature’s cruel.”

Col. Tall treats war like a competitive sport; his ego desires recognition, no matter the cost in human lives that it takes to receive it. With this statement, he tries to make a case that violence is part and parcel of existing in nature. Men like him feel as though they must prove their natural dominance through force.

The Thin Red Line opens with a shot of a crocodile — a violent natural predator — submerging itself in the murky, moss-covered water of a swamp. Late in the film, Malick shows us a similar crocodile — perhaps the same — tied to a board with ropes, surrounded by American soldiers with guns in the back of a truck.

For these men, as with Tall, it is in their nature to need to conquer. To dominate.

But from our point of view, the violence on both sides of the battlefield comes across as foolish at best, disastrously cruel at worst. Malick cutting away to shots of nature — and highlighting the effect of the fight on the animals within it — during this battle frames the conflict not just as a war between two groups of men, but as a reckless display of human ego disrupting and destroying the natural order that we, as humans, are supposed to be caretakers of.

This stylistic choice brings a unique, distinct point of view to what otherwise would be a familiar recreation of warfare.

Philosophical, unreliable, and fragmented voiceover narration explores the inner conflicts of these violent men throughout the film; Malick allows more than a half dozen characters to speak to us in voiceover during The Thin Red Line. Much of their narration explores a notion of the duality of human nature: we are both drawn to violence… and repulsed by it.

“I got ’em! I got ’em!” a soldier named Doll excitedly shouts to his company after his first kill. “I killed a man,” his voice then narrates, much more solemnly, in voiceover. “Worst thing you can do.”

Onscreen, he continues to celebrate his vicious accomplishment. In private narration, however, his melancholic tone betrays a deep internal conflict: “I killed a man. Nobody can touch me for it.”

Later, after the Americans overtake the hill and kill or capture all of their enemies, Malick lingers on a disturbing shot where we see nothing but dirt and the half-buried face of a dead Japanese soldier underground. “Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this?” the Japanese soldier asks in his narration. “Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too.”

This kind of philosophical narration adds dramatic irony, thoughtfulness, and thematic weight to the otherwise relentless plot of back-to-back battles in The Thin Red Line.

Many of the soldiers in The Thin Red Line have names, but most remain strangers to us. We learn subtextual pieces of information about only a select few characters through dialogue, voiceover, and flashbacks. Others are interchangeable.

Instead of deeply developing singular characters, Malick chooses to focus most of his storytelling efforts on the in-the-moment throes of agony, despair, and death for the many. He lingers on a shot of nameless, captured Japanese soldiers while they experience panic attacks and openly weep after the American soldiers take the hill. Characters whom we barely know — young and middle-aged alike — are killed throughout the battle; Malick lingers on their deaths longer than any other scenes that we have with them.

It’s an oddly affecting choice, to repeatedly force us to sit by the side of dying characters whom we do not know. It highlights the disastrous human waste of war — the potential that is snuffed out, the pasts and futures that we’ll never know.

The character who is developed the most, interestingly enough, is the man who sends the other soldiers into battle recklessly. During a lull in the fighting, the brash Lt. Col. Tall privately justifies his relentless tactics to one of his subordinates: “You don’t know what it feels Iike to be passed over. I mean, you’re young. You’re just out of the Academy. You’re, you know, you’ve got your war! This 15 years, this is my first war!”

In that moment, we recall a compliment said earlier to Tall by his own commanding officer: “Most men your age would have retired by now. We need general officers with maturity and character Iike you.”

“Maturity.” “Character.”

In the scenes between these two discordant statements, Tall orders many men to their deaths while he trails behind them, observing the destruction, from a safe distance. He is an imposter whose vanity and ego wreak destruction and havoc. With his character, Malick perfectly embodies his thematic sentiments about war. Malick then spends most of The Thin Red Line focusing on self-imposed, unbearable pain inflicted by men like him in this beautiful place.

The Thin Red Line is loosely bookended by scenes of life in a tribal community on a similarly beautiful, neighboring island. An AWOL soldier swims and plays freely with the tribe in the film’s opening scene. Later, he is scolded by his commanding officer for his dereliction of duty: “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain’t no world but this one.”

The soldier replies by saying, “You’re wrong there, Top. I seen another world.”

“I seen another world,” in essence, is Malick’s thesis; these scenes codify it, and all of the aforementioned examples either work to support or contradict it, allowing us to draw our own conclusions.

Taking the film in as the sum of these parts, Malick’s answer to the film’s narrated opening question — “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” — seems to be this: in spite of man’s proclivity for violence, there is a gentler way to live; in spite of man’s ego, there is a way to live at peace — if we allow ourselves to humbly and openly seek it out.