Many years before director Tony Scott got around to making such Hollywood friendly extravaganzas as "Top Gun" and "Man on Fire", he made this short Civil War film about a Confederate soldier going alone into enemy territory. Of course things go badly, which makes it especially unclear what the intention for the deadly mission was in the first place. Nonetheless, this visually interesting film does offer another examination of the atrocities of war, which was possibly the point of making the film anyway. It's told in a very quiet fashion, with minimal dialogue, and with an intensification of the sounds of nature. It's too bad that Scott couldn't have continued making films that show people in a more natural, personal way as opposed to how his characters ridiculously fatten up to caricatures with his bloated Hollywood work.

I like Tony Scott's eye candy. I think he exercises what a lot of critics look down their noses at certain filmmakers for exercising, which is visual style. That is the focal point of the art of film. I just don't know how much I like this debut of his. I think he was still testing the waters when he made this.

I like the idea of slowly and quietly building to a climax of madness, but he doesn't quite keep me riveted. I think both the rising action of the film and the climax are both a little tedious and a little overworked. I like Scott's concept but his execution needed work. He worked on it, of course, and now, I think, his movies are some of the most fun you can have at the movies.

Scott's early feature reflects the aesthetic predilections of students at the Royal College of Art and other similar schools in England in the late 1960s and early 1970s--that is an intense vision of nature related to the art of the radical painters in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth-century. This represented a rejection of then-dominant modernism in art. Scott's exquisitely photographed (in black and white) natural scenery relates to paintings by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Arthur Hughes, then enjoying a renaissance of sorts. In the relation of natural innocence, poignant ruins, and war, the short anticipates Malick's "The Thin Red Line," and here can easily be seen as a reflection on the disaster that was Viet Nam in 1971. In addition, one wonders if Scott studied Winslow Homer's works in art school, for one of the most famous illustrations and paintings by the American artist who chronicled the Civil War was one of a sharpshooter in a tree, wielding a newly invented firearm that could slay at great distance--a coldly mechanized aspect of this particular war. Scott's protagonist reflects on that seemingly unfair advantage, from the position of someone who experiences the heat of battle both behind and in front of the barrel. An impressive early feature, very much of its time.