Even if they could be watched without knowledge of their provenance, they would be instantly identifiable as the work of Terrence Malick, whose 1970's "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" were the most beautiful and elusive films of their time. Malick's subsequent two decades in cinema limbo may have turned him into a figure of hype-inviting mystery, but it's immediately obvious that they have not dimmed his visual genius. It's as if a familiar voice had never left off speaking as, at long last, Malick's huge new opus begins.
His intoxication with natural beauty, fused so palpably and strangely with the psychic sleepwalking of his human characters, remains exactly as it was. So does the innate momentousness that has always come so easily to Malick's filmmaking. Here is a visceral reminder of all that made his past work so hauntingly majestic, even if this movie's difficulties will soon announce themselves with equal clarity. Intermittently brilliant as it is, "The Thin Red Line" shows why being a great film director and directing a great film are not the same.