Rating: 
Summary: ambivalent
Review: As one who rarely watches movies I watched this and Private Ryan on successive nights and watched them both twice. Am of two minds about this movie. First, the movie primarily is carried by an excellent depiction of modern battle amid breathtaking background and excellent acting. Other than Private Ryan, this certainly appears as realistic a battle movie as one is likely to find. I felt P. Ryan was an attempt to accurately place the terror of battle on the screen. For all of us civilians who have witnessed, read and watch on screen a man marching off to his probable death, there is always the question, why are they doing it, how would I react in the same situation. TRL like PR puts you right there with superb scenes, though PR probably exceeds in realism and believability.Secondly, I view this film as a cauldron of missed opportunity by the director. He had all these great acting performances, and really, I believe, failed to make the great film out of them which he might have made. Two observations here: One, too many characters fleetingly identified to the point you get lost. Too many look the same under the helmets and there is little to distinguish them. Watching the movie twice helps only marginally. Second, the movie is built around the wrong characters. The strenghts here are Nick Nolte and the Captain, instead we end up with the director attempting to carry the movie with Penn and the jumble of privates. Director had something really good going with Nolte and just let it fade away. Finally, one has to comment on the philosophical content which both preface and end the movie ad naseum. I tried honestly to listen and absorb both times, and it is even worse the second time around. If you are going to turn a movie into an anti war treatise, please do it with some intelligence. Very few of us are going to get carried away with philosophic musings of a junior high school graduate. Next time give us the thoughts of the guy who read Homer in Greek.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting insight into the psychodrama of war
Review: I went into this movie thinking it was going to be similar to "Saving Private Ryan". This movie is NOTHING like SPR. Although filled with an impressive cast of actors, this movie left me wanting much more. The movie also jumps around quite a bit which became rather annoying. Although it was very interesting into the darker side of war, I was still left wondering what the director was trying to do. The most tragic scene in my eyes is when a soldier is asked for a divorce by his wife at home who has become lonely. I was honestly left sickened by this scence by this woman's betrayal. Very powerful. The special effects are okay, nothing like SPR, and it is much less graphic than SPR. On the whole I would say I was disappointed. Darin
Rating: 
Summary: Discovery
Review: The most intriguing thing about TTRL is not the movie itself. No, it is discovering how you can possibly find hundreds of 5 star reviews for this abominable waste of celluloid. I have discovered the answer. University professors are using this movie as a class study for aspiring fiction writers. They are to watch this unending cinematic dreck and then invent a glowing report of it. This is good practice for most professional critics as well. Write nice things about Malick's Folly and you'll get invited to all the right parties.
Rating: 
Summary: Not just a great war film, but a great film, period.
Review: The Thin Red Line is not a mainstream movie that concentrates solely on plot to please audiences and make money. It is a work of art. The whole movie is basically one long battle scene where YOU are almost there with the men fighting the war. I'll warn you that you will either love it or hate it. At nearly 3 hours long, you may find it slow and boring. This will most likely be the case if you only go into movies looking for some laughs or action. Otherwise, you'll probably find it more enjoyable and see its greatness.
Rating:
Summary: A mystic look at war
Review: Not so much about WW2 in the pacific then about the cruelty of war in general, this poetic film is a sad but perfect retelling of all wars. A tragic tale that leaves one breathless. This is one war movie that cannot be left unseen. Thoroughly reccomended.
Rating:
Summary: Simply great
Review: I am just going to say what most of the people who liked this movie would like to say but are afraid, "Sorry if you didn't get the movie, sorry if artsy and intellectual films go over your head, sorry if you can only watch Arnold, Jon Claude, and Stallone movies to get you excited, sorry if you need the point of a movie to hit you over your head like a sledge hammer, sorry about your luck - this movie is not for you". People, this movie is great because it lets you decide for yourself the point/meaning - it is not going to spoon feed the answer for you like Saving Private Ryan does (although that movie was laced with symbolism which probably went right over most viewers heads, and is why it won the awards it did). I am glad that most people hated this movie, it reaffirms my theory that this country is filled with simple minded folk with short attention spans, no appreciation for art, poetry, symbolism, irony, or just plain contemplative pondering. That is why films such as American Beauty, Magnolia, and The Thin Red Line get blasted by so many, because they are really only meant for the minority of film going people - the smart, intellectual, pretentious, egghead, idealistic, ivory tower person. Most people are not going to like this film because it will go over their head!! I like the movie because of that reason, it goes over my head!! I have to THINK about it for a while, digest it, analyze it, break it down and figure out for myself the significance and meaning. Face it, the average person wants to sit in front of the T.V. for 90 minutes, be blasted with icons instead of actors, violence instead of plot, catchy tunes rather than great compositions, and sex instead of cinematography. Get a life and stick to your own kind of movies like End of days, Ernest goes to camp, Runaway bride, forces of nature, Die hard, Notting Hill, Independance day, and Titanic - and all the other stuff the evil side of hollywood keeps belching out.
Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest films of recent years
Review: I make a distinction between a "movie" and a "film." "The Thin Red Line" is definitely the latter. If you go into the feature expecting a standard war story full of bravado and patriotic flag waving, you will no doubt be disappointed. I think many viewers went into this film expecting something similar to "Saving Private Ryan" (especially given its close proximity release date). This is NOT a tribute to veterans, it is NOT a "hurray" to America, and it does NOT have the uplift so common to Spielbergian style films. My primary criticism is that the characters in the film often blend together, both in the accent of their dialogue and the nature of their appearance. Malick's direction makes it difficult for the viewer to immediately pick out the primary characters, so the viewer potentially becomes lost in the ensemble cast of primary players and inconsequential fillers, not fully sure who to pay attention to. With that criticism aside, I have to point out everything that this film does so well. Cinematically, it is a masterpiece. (I feel the film was slighted at the Oscars, deserving the awards for cinematography, editing, and score.) Malick uses the American push toward Japan (notably Guadal Canal) as the setting for this war epic. While the film traces the lives of several soldiers during this timespan, the action truly serves as a backdrop for Malick's own transcendental philosophies and his exploration of war's effect on men. There was a lot of nature footage intercut throughout the film, effectively contrasting the brutality of war and humanity against the serenity of nature, and ultimately calling into question our own relevance in the natural equation. The saying from which the film draws its title, "There is a thin red line between the sane and the mad," is explored throughout the film, from a Colonel who will go to no ends in the hopes of furthering his career to a soldier who cuts out the golden teeth of Japanese opponents that he kills. The story is not so much of a straight forward narrative as it is a glimpse into the daily lives of soldiers and the rigors (physical and mental) that they face. As many viewers have described it, the film is a form of visual poetry. It is not afraid to dapple in areas and focus on a serene element of nature, nor is it afraid to flashback to a soldier's memory of the past. Refractive voice-overs are prevalent throughout the film, and they ultimately contribute to the poetic nature of the film and add insight into the soldier's psyche. "Artsy" would be an understatement in regard to this film; this is one of the few works that I saw in a theater and thought "Wow, I've just seen something truly remarkable" afterwards. As for the DVD release, the print quality was excellent, but it would have been nice if some extra features had been included, perhaps a trailer. The choral songs that were included were neat, but quirky at best, not something that many viewers would derive much satisfaction from.
Rating:
Summary: War as nihilism
Review: I rented this and noticed that the previous viewer had given up after about a tenth of an inch of tape, not having rewound it. I could see why. This begins as an arty war movie that is not doing either the arty or the war part right. I would have given up on it myself except that it had been nominated for a number of awards, and I knew there had to be something I was missing. So I occasionally rewound the tape and listened and watched carefully. Gradually something began to build. The impressionistic and stream of consciousness techniques began to pull me in and to mesh with the flashbacks and poetic voice-overs to make a meaningful contrast with the jungle and carnage. The studied camera work with the long takes on the faces of the soldiers, interspersed with panoramic vistas of jungle and mountain and naturalistic shots of tropical island animals, lead me to believe that in making this, Director Terrence Malick had taken Shakespeare as his muse, in particular the celebrated words from MacBeth: "...[Life] is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing." As other critics have pointed out, Malick's movie does indeed signify nothing, and perhaps that is the point. But I am somewhat troubled by such an interpretation of our involvement in World War II. I would feel more comfortable had such a point of view and attendant techniques been employed in depicting our involvement in Vietnam or even in World War I. But to imply that the sacrifices made by our soldiers at Guadalcanal and elsewhere in the South Pacific were for nothing is entirely off base. Almost any war fought anywhere is a monumental waste; but if there is one exception is it without doubt World War II. We had no choice but to oppose European fascism and the expansionist policies of Imperial Japan. I shudder to think what the world would be like now, had we not. Imagine being surrounded by totalitarian regimes with their gas ovens and their slave labor, their policies of racial and cultural genocide. By comparison, such a reality would make George Orwell's "1984" nightmare seem a benign fantasy. I am also wondering how James Jones himself would feel about this impressionistic interpretation of his realistic novel. He was one of a generation of writers, including Norman Mailer and James Michener, who found their inspiration in the war in the Pacific. He is also the author of From Here To Eternity (1951), made a couple of years later into an academy-award winning movie starring Burt Lancaster (an excellent movie, by the way). I suspect that Jones would have to feel some ambiguity toward Director Terrence Malick's production of this sequel. Jones certainly did not feel that our participation and experience in World War II was meaningless. Nor was his personal experience meaningless. Furthermore to make his novel into a revisionist impression of war as nihilistic hell misses not only the spirit of his novel but the entire point of our involvement in World War II. I wonder how those who survived the horrific experience of Guadalcanal and similar battles feel about this movie. I wonder if they think it was accurate and fair and expressed their sense of experience. The performances by James Caviezel as Pvt. Witt and Sean Penn as First Sergeant Welsh were excellent. Nick Nolte as Col. Gordon Tall was also good, although he occasionally reminded me of George C. Scott doing General Patton. Perhaps the best sequence in the movie was the recollection in flashback by Pvt. Jack Bell (Ben Chaplin) of his sensual wife back in the states and the agony of being separated from her, and then the brutal knife of her letter telling him she had fallen in love with another man. The inclusion of a third element, that of the Pacific Islanders themselves amid the strife as innocents watching the gladiators, was valuable as perspective. However what might have been added was the brutality and enslavement they experienced at the hands of the Japanese military. Malick gave us none of that perhaps because such a view might have detracted from his purpose, that of depicting war as an expression of our nihilistic nature. Incidentally some have said that this treatment owes something to Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried," or even to the spirit of the Thomas Hardy poem, "The Man He Killed." Certainly there is an intentional allusion to Carl Sandberg's poem "Grass" when one of the soldiers holds up some grass and says something like, "This is us." O'Brien's short story was an intense focus on the artifacts carried by soldiers and what the bare artifacts implied. Yes, I believe Malick was influenced by O'Brien, certainly in the sense that this is a strongly visual film. It's what our eyes see that counts, and not so much the story or what is said.
Rating:
Summary: POETRY PUT TO FILM
Review: This is probabley the best war movie ever made. Its' only competition is Apocolypse Now. It has one of the best casts ever assembled including John Travolta, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Jim Caviezel(in one of the best breathrough performances ever). I can't understand how people could ever think that Saving Privat Ryan was a better movie since it was basically just a glorified action movie and The Thin Red Line is about as close to true art as movies get.
Rating:
Summary: thin red line
Review: One of the worst movies I have ever seen. Given the reviews, I expected to at least to enjoy this movie. What I didn't realize is that it is a film travelogue not set anywhere near Guadalcanal. There is a plot, and some acting, but mainly there are gorgeous shots of rainforest. Interspersed are philosophical narration, and flashbacks, which serve to make the movie even longer. The beginning and end of this movie are too far apart.
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