If you've longed to see a film whose every shot is almost achingly beautiful, each an expression of the state of the cinematographer's art, I've got a movie for you.

But to enjoy it, you will have to overlook the following:

"The Thin Red Line" is unfocussed, overlong, numbingly repetitive and boring. It squanders good performances by its actors. The people in it mostly don't act like real humans. There's even an embarrassing, obvious Christ figure: the central character Whit (perhaps after Walt Whitman, who, as Malick does, felt a great bond with salt-of-the-earth types, especially boys, without ever seeming to interact with them). A huge chunk of Whit's screen time is spent gazing sympathetically and silently on his comrades and enemies alike with a beatific Mona Lisa smile, allowing us to admire his tanned prominent cheekbones and bright green eyes.

It's about three hours long, but it seems like five. Every time the story threatens to get interesting, Malick stops it dead to show one of thousand or so nature shots or flashbacks of a soldier's pretty young wife. There's cornball use of symbolism, particularly around birds representing souls, that reduces the movie's anti-war message to triteness. Most irritating of all are the endless voice-overs. These consist of the insufferable philosophical ponderings of the various redneck Rod McKuens who make up this company. I was never sure which one was supposed to be talking at any point, and I didn't care.

You'll also have to weather some distracting, possibly unbilled cameos by big-name actors. The funniest is John Travolta, who's completely unconvincing as a doughy teddy-bear of a general. He's Nick Nolte's BOSS! Travolta, even with mustache, summons enough gravitas to be the entertainment at a kid's birthday party -- that's about it. There's a reason Gene Hackman usually gets these roles...

And all the loving shots of pensive, full-lipped young soldiers! I felt like I was watching a promotion for some gay adventure travel outfit.

Even ignoring all the gratuitous travelogue shots, the staging and storytelling are muddled. In a scene near the end of the film, a situation develops in some creek beds where a small group of soldiers is isolated and apparently doomed. But Malick doesn't follow it through! Short of the climax, he cuts away to the aftermath. We have no clue how it played out. And what was Woody Harrelson's character doing with the knife and a hand-grenade at the end of one shot? How did it relate to what happened to him when the story returned to Woody a minute later? It's all a muddle. The best thing I can say for this movie is that it's a fantastic commercial for the vastly superior "Saving Private Ryan." Why did critics like this mess?