In recent times while most movies include various "points" to be made, nearly all of them are produced to "entertain" a target audience and make money. Reviews are meant to give potential viewers some hints on what to expect.
Very few films are instead produced with the prime objective of stating a position: being it an artistic or ethical-socio-political POV. Our opinion that - demos and educational content aside - a movie isn't the best medium for such "statements" is generally ignored and, as such, irrelevant: symbolic engagement is still more effective than reasoning and thus a well designed movie is more persuasive than a logic text. Regarding these films - as far as we are concerned - reviews are someway as interesting as watching the film itself because serious reviews virtually become part of a discussion. And some discussions easily heat-up...
Here we have such a film; one - unfortunately - where the author naively uses complex concepts like truth, reality, history, nature (just to name a few) and aims at being a-political while dealing with the most influential event of our world: 2nd world war.
The result? Talking about Malick's "The thin red line" isn't casual: the parallel is obvious, deliberate and merciless. While Malick let soldiers share with few words their relationship with life, love, war, etc... here we have a lot of preachy-poetic voice-overs from the protagonist (a supposedly simple-minded soldier) and even an out-of-context female lecturing us with "godly wisdom". The outcome is that while in Malick's film I could feel moved by the soldiers' perspectives and engaged by their aesthetic-philosophic value, here I feel like someone is trying to sell me a not-so-subtle brainwashing into Pepe's simplistic world-view.
Let's not even dig about the technical proficiency: sub par is the first word coming to our mind.
In the end the bravery required to commit into a project like this (which would like to go way further than any WW2 tale of good VS evil) should be paired with a deeper understanding of what you're doing. Mr Pepe, if you want to change people's perspective or at least enlarge it, being a preachy commercial marketer doesn't work anymore. Get a serious culture (Malick studied his whole life, you have likely just taken a semester of contemporary history) and write a serious book. Otherwise, humbly, forget about "Art" and Malick and just seek to entertain.
