Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line , Terrence Malick's return to cinema after 20 years. I've sat through it twice and am still trying to sort out my responses, which run from awe to mockery and back. Like Saving Private Ryan , the picture wallops you in the gut with brilliant, splattery battle montages and Goyaesque images of hell on earth. But Malick, a certified intellectual and the Pynchonesque figure who directed Badlands and Days                 of                 Heaven in the 1970s and then disappeared, is in a different philosophical universe from Steven Spielberg. Post-carnage, his sundry characters philosophize about their experiences in drowsy, runic voice-overs that come at you like slow bean balls: "Why does nature vie with itself? ... Is there an avenging power in nature, not one power but two?" Or "This great evil: Where's it come from? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us, robbin' us of life and light?" First you get walloped with viscera, then you get beaned by blather. The Thin Red Line has a curious sound-scape, as the noise of battle frequently recedes to make room for interior monologues and Hans Zimmer's bump-bump, minimalist New Age music. Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplin) talks to his curvy, redheaded wife, viewed in deliriously sensual flashbacks. ("Love: Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us?") Lt. Col. Tall (Nolte), a borderline lunatic passed over one too many times for promotion and itching to win a battle no matter what the human cost, worries groggily about how his men perceive him. The dreamer Witt poses folksy questions about whether we're all a part of one big soul. If the movie has a spine, it's his off-and-on dialogue with Sgt. Welsh (Penn), who's increasingly irritated by the private's beatific, almost Billy Budd-like optimism. Says Welsh, "In this world, a man himself is nothin', and there ain't no world but this one." Replies Witt, high cheekbones glinting, "I seen another world." At first it seems as if Witt will indeed be Billy Budd to Welsh's vindictive Claggart. But if Witt is ultimately an ethereal martyr, Welsh turns out to be a Bogart-like romantic who can't stop feeling pain in the face of an absent God. He speaks the movie's epitaph, "Darkness and light, strife and love: Are they the workings of one mind, the feature of the same face? O my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made, all things shining." Malick puts a lot of shining things on the screen: soldiers, natives, parrots, bats, rodents, visions of Eden by way of National Geographic and of the Fall by way of Alpo. Malick's conception of consciousness distributes it among the animate and inanimate alike Whether or not these pearllike epiphanies are strung is another matter. Malick throws out his overarching theme--is nature two-sided, at war with itself?--in the first few minutes but, for all his startling juxtapositions, he never dramatizes it with anything approaching the clarity of, say, Brian De Palma's Casualties of War (1989). Besides the dialogue between Welsh and Witt, The Thin Red Line 's other organizing story involves a wrenching tug of war between Nolte's ambition-crazed Tall and Capt. Staros (Elias Koteas), who refuses an order to send his men on what will surely be a suicidal--and futile--assault on a bunker. But matters of cause and effect don't really interest Malick. Individual acts of conscience can and do save lives, and heroism can win a war or a battle, he acknowledges. But Staros is ultimately sent packing, and Malick never bothers to trace the effect of his action on the Guadalcanal operation. In fact, the entire battle seems to take place in a crazed void. Tall quotes Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn" and orders a meaningless bombardment to "buck the men up--it'll look like the Japs are catching hell." Soldiers shoot at hazy figures, unsure whether they're Japanese or American. Men collide, blow themselves in half with their own mishandled grenades, stab themselves frantically with morphine needles, shove cigarettes up their noses to keep the stench of the dying and the dead at bay. A tiny bird, mortally wounded, flutters in the grass. Malick is convincing--at times overwhelming--on the subject of chaos. It's when he tries to ruminate on order that he gets gummed up, retreating to one of his gaseous multiple mouthpieces: "Where is it that we were together? Who is it that I lived with? Walked with? The brother. ... The friend. ... One mind." I think I'd have an easier time with Malick's metaphysical speculations if I had a sense of some concomitant geopolitical ones--central to any larger musings on forces of nature as viewed through the prism of war. Couldn't it be that the German and Japanese fascist orders were profoundly anti-natural, and that the Allies' cause was part of a violent but natural correction? You don't have to buy into Spielberg's Lincolnesque pieties in Saving Private Ryan to believe that there's a difference between World War II and Vietnam (or, for that matter, World War II and the invasion of Grenada or our spats with Iraq). While he was at Harvard, Malick might have peeled himself off the lap of his pointy-headed mentor, Stanley Cavell, the philosopher and film theorist, and checked out a few of Michael Waltzer's lectures on just and unjust wars. Maybe then he'd view Guadalcanal not in an absurdist vacuum (the soldiers come, they kill and are killed, they leave) but in the larger context of a war that was among the most rational (in its aims, if not its methods) fought in the last several centuries. For all his visionary filmmaking, Malick's Zen neutrality sometimes seems like a cultivated--and pretentious--brand of fatuousness. John Travolta's empty nightclub impersonation of Bill Clinton in Primary Colors (1998) had one positive result: It gave him a jump-start on Jan Schlichtmann, the reckless personal injury lawyer at the center of A Civil Action . Travolta's Schlichtmann is much more redolent of Clinton: slick and selfish and corrupt in lots of ways but basically on the side of the angels, too proud and arrogant to change tactics when all is certainly lost. Schlichtmann pursued--and more or less blew--a civil liability case against the corporate giants Beatrice and W.R. Grace over the allegedly carcinogenic water supply of Woburn, Mass. Boston writer Jonathan Harr, in the book the movie is based on, went beyond the poison in the Woburn wells to evoke (stopping just short of libel) the poison of the civil courts, where platoons of overpaid corporate lawyers can drive opponents with pockets less deep and psyches less stable into bankruptcy and hysteria.

<question>:
According to the film reviewer, Thin Red Line has succeeded in all of the following EXCEPT:

<options>:
A Overwhelming viewers with bloodshed and prattle
B Not living up to its pre-release date hype
C Creating one of film's most notorious villains
D Maintaining an unnecessarily long-winded tone

<answer>:

C