Malick's mystery

Is there another more "Malickian" version of The Thin Red Line out there? (I hope so) If so, how much does it matter? (Moving Image Source)

Another scenario, raised in a long-lost magazine article written by an actor who claimed to have been cut from the film, maintains that Malick’s original five-plus-hour cut was a radically different film—that is, it was an orthodox narrative, close to the James Jones novel (and also using material from From Here to Eternity), attendant to a historical timeline, and focused to some large degree on Corporal Fife (Adrien Brody). Did this film ever exist? Can we even imagine it? The story continues that Malick’s intention was to prioritize the semi-familiar new actors playing the grunts and noncoms over the movie stars playing the officers, in what would seem to be an almost political gesture. Of course, the suits at Fox balked, and so Malick set about editing the film down by some 40 percent. Famously, when the producer of Breathless asked Jean-Luc Godard to cut 30 minutes, Godard obliged him by cutting, in critic J. Hoberman's words, "whatever he deemed boring," including transitions and expository scenes. In the embattled version of The Thin Red Line's genesis, Malick attacked his director’s edit in much the same manner, dumping most of the dialogue and nearly all of the story’s connective tissue. Fife was relegated to a few minutes of screen time, while scores of other prominent roles (including those filled by Gary Oldman, Viggo Mortensen, and Bill Pullman) were scrapped altogether.