Nick Nolte as a captain wasn't sellable.
Watch it again, he plays a Lieutenant Colonel in command of an infantry battalion and then later is promoted to Colonel and command of the Regiment. He plays the part extremely well. It was quite accurate too as many battalion commanders in the early part of the war were older, in their late 40s and 50s and promotions in the pre-war army were slow if not stagnant.
The Company Commander was played by Elias Koteas who also did an excellent job. The struggle between Nolte's Characters and that of Koteas' is a great story of the problem of mission or men; which do you put first and for what reasons do you push the men into extreme danger? was the Captain too close to his men? Was it as bad as he thought it was? (note the way the artillery barrage his company gets caught in is filmed). Was Nolte's character's motivations the right one? Accomplish the mission, or look good to his superiors for promotion? Are the two notions mutually exclusive or do they go hand in hand in order to get the terrible job done? Does The Army care what a leader's motivations are as long as the objectives are being taken? There are many underlying stories and plots in this movie if you take the time to really watch it. Terrence Malick showed his genius on this one as he stuck pretty firm to the portion of the book he chose from which to make the movie.
What hurt TTRL is that it came out after Saving Private Ryan which although a good movie, it suffers from Spielberg's usual goody-two-shoes smarmy-ness. For example, the more powerful ending would have been when the elder Ryan walks up to the headstone and salutes Captain Miller's grave than the emotional breakdown that immediately follows. And if you are worried about age problems, Ted Danson as a young Airborne Infantry Lieutenant? Really?
SPR was all hooah, flag waving mom and apple pie. it is fine, a good movie and it brought back realism to filming war movies not seen since the excellent Cross of Iron. But TTRL was that much better as it showed the WWII was no-cake walk. It was hard, violent brutal and ripped at men's' souls. Whereas SPR made you fell proud, TTRL might make you squirm a little. it is funny that Band of Brothers, also showing ETO, was all flag waving and positive, making the men larger than life, but The Pacific, also about the PTO like TTRL, was dark, and showed how war destroyed not just men's bodies but their heart mind and souls.
My father was a WWII vet and a grew up with many influences form such men. One high school girlfriend's father was a tanker in Normandy who was pulled from a burning Sherman on one nice summer's day. When he took a little sun you could see, even in the 1970s, the outline of his goggles around his eyes. He spoke not at all about his glory days of 1944-45. He was a gentle man for all the time I knew him; kind of quiet.. went about his daily work with little to no complaint. Reflecting on that, I suspect his soul was damaged if not shattered by his terrible experiences. He probably had nightmares up to the day he passed on. I wish I knew him better now that I think about it.
You might not like it, because I suspect your expectation of TTRL was to have the Pacific War version of SPR. But no, you got a darker vision of war, with music in a constant minor key that rises in volume with the fear and expectation of death (the score is one of the most excellent ever written for a war movie as it conveys mood very well) just before the violence hits.
Each time I watch TTRL, I like it even more; SPR not much as so.