This is not a “war film” and it is not an “antiwar film.” What Malick (a former philosophy student) has done is use the setting of modern warfare as a way of communicating the essence of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and ethics. Underneath the surface of the observable, individuated phenomena, the essence of the world is will: a non-individuated, passionate yet pointless destructive striving. The will is embodied in Nick Nolte, who lives to fight and win, while recognizing that his way is the way of “nature.” “Look at those vines, Staros, swallowing everything. Nature is cruel.” True insight into the nature of the will, however, leads to compassion for the suffering of others, since we are all One behind appearances, and renunciation of desiring (and its inevitable concomitants, conflict and suffering). The denial of the will is represented by Jim Cavaziel. According to Schopenhauer, if one recognizes the futility of willing but cannot achieve this state of complete ascetic denial, the only other alternative is to mitigate one’s own suffering by keeping one’s expectations as low as possible. This stance is embodied by Sean Penn. From the first, crucial dialogue between Penn and Cavaziel, the agenda of the film is placed before us: given that the world is as it is, should we cling to this world and despair, or should we turn away from it and transcend? As Penn says, “there’s no world but this one.” Cavaziel replies, “I’ve seen another world.” That is what the film is about: a choice between mysticism and nihilism.

The film is not pro-war, because it assumes as Schopenhauer did, that moral justifications of war are always nothing more than rationalizations of a more fundamental need for violence. The film is not anti-war, because unlike all other anti-war films, it does not set up a contrast between a morally praiseworthy form of ordinary life and a morally repugnant form of activity created by and creating war. If war is an expression of the cruelty of nature, or reality itself, moral judgment of it makes no sense—-one might as well condemn the jungle for being jungle. This goes some way toward explaining the peculiar detachment the film aspires to and achieves. The catastrophe the characters are caught up in is the world itself, and the film offers no adequate response to it than to serenely transcend it.