Terrence Malick makes films with an alacrity that makes even Stanley Kubrick look prolific; this is only his second since Badlands in 1973, and his first in a little over 20 years. As the astonishing cast list of The Thin Red Line provides, however, his reputation is assured: Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Cusack, John C. Reilly, John Travolta, a ferocious Nick Nolte and the increasingly impressive Elias Koteas. It remains, though, very much a film without stars, one where Malick is concerned with people, not actors; everyone is expendable. True ensemble playing.

Equally, there is nothing much to say of the linearity of narrative that can even begin to approach Malick's dazzlingly complex vision of James Jones' classic W.W.II novel about the 1942 storming of Guadalcanal. As a war film - literally, a film about war - it's a cousin to Coppola's masterly Apocalypse Now. Malick uses this struggle as a hook; the film jettisons explanation and political pretext. Perverse as it may seem, for a picture so dedicated to the visceral reality of combat there is a purity here, a veritable state of grace.

The battle scenes - cascading bombs; assaulting a machine-gun nest; the terrifying skim of tracer fire - are extraordinary. Malick's editors perform an exemplary job. But, equally, this is a war film that has time to drop out, to take in landscape, to push languorously through flora and fauna. The balance of chaos and serenity has seldom been captured with such skill.

Visually - and like 1978's Days of Heaven, this is a very visual film - John Toll's cinematography cannot help but be diminished by the video experience. But then The Thin Red Line, unlike Spielberg's bombastic and wearingly 'important' Saving Private Ryan, is more than simple show and tell. Malick's screenplay, heavily reliant on voiceover, is rich and allusive. There is a crafted synthesis of sound and image (Hans Zimmer's score is a knockout) seldom seen outside of Lynch or Kieslowski. It is a humane film that transmutes the grand vista and the life of the mind with a rare profundity.

Ultimately, though, the real triumph of Malick's film - which is, let's not mince words, very probably a masterpiece - is in bucking the recent trend towards loud, vacuous spectacle, effortlessly demonstrating that the intimate and the epic need not be strangers.