Rating: 
Summary: THE BEST WAR FILM OF ALL TIME
Review: The first time I saw this movie was in the theatres and i was just awe struck. I rented the tape over the summer and liked it even more. Now I finally just watched it on dvd and i have concluded this is one of the best war films in the history of filmaking. I have read many of the other reviews and it is one of those i love it or hate it. one or five stars. everybody is entitled to their opinion. i can see why many of the main stream audiences didn't like this movie. it was slow in some parts and it takes a lot of patience to truly enjoy this film, and not to mention three hours of it. it is not like saving private ryan, where they develope characters so you can feel and go through the emotions that they suffer. TRL is just opposite. Men come and go. They come and die and we don't even know their name. Thats why i liked it so much. That is truly what war is. You don't know some of the boys your fighting with. You don't want to know them because they can be dead in a second. TRL brings the viewer through that emotion. It is more accurate than the hollywood made SPR. Don't get me wrong, I thought SPR was well done movie, I own it and enjoy it. It just doesn't create the same emotion in me that i had when I watched TRL. If you seen it once, you sould see it again. It is a film that really needs to be seen twice.
Rating: 
Summary: Rather crude filmmaking despite the beautiful images.
Review: What could be more obvious, when your subject is the ugliness and futility of war, than to alternate hideous battle scenes with beautiful images, i.e. breathtaking shots of nature and somebody's lovely wife on a swing back home?And what's a more obvious and contrived way to convey the psychological trauma experienced by soldiers than to have them recite protracted, cliche-ridden, pseudo-poetic monologues at the drop of a hat? And people find this film deep and profound? The only thing I get from it is that Terence Mallick is trying really hard to be great. This movie may be visually breathtaking, but it doesn't change the fact that it's an artistic failure.
Rating:
Summary: According to the people who like it, it's a bad movie . . .
Review: The average customer review for this film here is 3-and-1/2 stars, which could only mean that the majority of reviewers actually like this film. This makes a mockery of many reviewers' claim that TRL is only appreciated by a small, intellectually superior minority. And by the twisted reasoning of these same people, who hold that a popular movie must be a bad movie, then TRL must indeed be pretty bad. And if it's true that the majority opinion about many films is often initially misguided, only to be changed and revised over subsequent years, then the passage of time will see The Thin Red Line recognized for the pretentious drivel that it is.
Rating:
Summary: a remarkable film experience
Review: Not since "The English Patient" had one film affirmed for me how a remarkable film experience can sometimes become one of the most elevated forms of expression people can make. "The Thin Red Line" transports us to an otherworldly, savagely beautiful place, and we are left to grapple with the ugliness people are perfectly capable of engendering. It was only after seeing Malick's characters painfully contend with their own modernity that I could ever hope to even understand the historical forces that could transform the unspoilt fastness of Guadalcanal-whose indigenous people have never so much as seen outsiders prior to 1942-could quite suddenly become a graveyard. All told, tens of thousands of Americans, Australians, over half a million Japanese (to say nothing of the Melansians!) would die in the Solomon Islands & New Guinea. What's even more surprising is that Malick leaves us very little room to pass any judgement of guilt on anyone. To paraphrase Jean Renoir, No one is truly villainous as every one has his or her own reasons. Setting the soldiers' private battles within a very public cataclysm that is as much their very own making as it is beyond their control, it is as if Malick wanted to show that Man's expulsion from Paradise only resulted in an innate, retributive urge to destroy other Edens---and himself in the process. One particularly haunting voiceover in the film pleads that "if I never meet you, may I feel the lack." Testifying to the fact that war is indeed the worst place to be a human being, and yet the only true place to recognize one's humanity, he makes us acutely feel the enormity of that loss in all its possible implications. Talk about an existential crisis! To reduce "Thin Red Line" in terms of a simple war movie, or even an anti-war movie so you could set it against the moral simplicity of "Saving Private Ryan" is missing the point. Whereas all the flag-waving and the willful misuse of the of all the Civil War quotations in "Private Ryan" confirm Spielberg's intention that his war movie be identified a as a purely American parable, the "Thin Red Line's" great ambition was that it hoped to address an even larger polity. Scenes like the one where wild dogs feast on the corpses of American dead, or the lingering shot of a of bloodied hatchling shaken from its nest, or the one where a tribesman politely ignores an army column, or the that final scene where a solitary, germinating coconut witnesses the troops disembarking for another death trap are visually inventive as they are telling. With nature and the inescapable cycles of death and rebirth as his proxies, Malick urges us to not impressed by our own self-importance. On one final cavil, I wonder why some people can still think that poetry, literal and cinematic, is exclusively the province of the haughty when Malick shows us (as he did in his previous work) that poems can be as accessible, relevant and as clear a vision of where we are and where we could be. Spielberg knew about poems once, and the complexity and the comparably rich palette he afforded us in the unheralded "Empire of the Sun," is one that all of Janus' Kaminsky's spectacular camerawork in "Private Ryan" or even "Shindler's List" could never hope to recreate. The latter two films have at least proven that even with raw talent, cautionary fables (however harrowing)and agitprop are much easier to come by. Art is altogether different and is therefore uncommon: if it weren't for something as elusive as a genuine creative vision aren't all movies then just lengths of exposed film and magnetically-encoded sound?
Rating:
Summary: a new perspective on war
Review: An outstanding film. The Thin Red Line's reputation will benefit with the passage of time and with retrospective comparisons to Saving Private Ryan. SPR was a sentimental story of heroism, with evil Germans and noble Americans. The Thin Red Line is a prolonged meditation on the nature of evil, and long after the facile dichotomies of SPR are exposed the issues of this film will remain. In that sense, this is not a war movie. Do not expect a fast pace throughout. There are battle scenes and realistic gore, but the film is about who we are and why we fight, how we can find and be so barbaric in a world of such great natural beauty. The cinematography, which includes gorgeous shot after gorgeous shot, is outstanding. Worth watching with the volume off.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a great film by a great director
Review: I did not want to write anything about "Saving Private Ryan" here, but many comments force me to. The film is not nearly as simplistic as some Malick-buffs want it to be. In fact, it is far more subtle than this one, because all the situations remain uncommented (the superflous framing device notwithstanding). In TRL, Malick includes many unfortunate voice-overs, which do not sound like soldiers in comebat but like the last survivor of Woodstock. Don't get me wrong. TRL is a good film. The cinematography is extraordinary, as is the acting and Hans Zimmers score. But there is no doubt that it is also pretentious and mannered, though I would not go so far to call it self-indulgent. I must also say that Malick's film is too disjointed, particularly the last 45 minutes. I'm sure this was deliberate, but any film (or book) needs at least a slight bit of coherence. I do not say this because I did not get the message of TRL. The point is not wether you are smart enough or not. It is just the fact that this approach makes the film too arbitrary. The bottom line is that SPR is more meaningful than it seems at first sight. With TRL it is just vice versa. A philosophical, non-coherent approach does not automatically make a film sophisticated. Many statements in TRL are awfully simplistic. It is not even very poetic, because it strives too hard to be just that. It is a brilliantly filmed, but otherwise flawed film. Still a picture, that no serious moviegoer can afford to ignore. Note: Since I am German, my English may not be flawless, too.
Rating:
Summary: Suprised by how good this film actually is!
Review: I love this movie. I refused to watch it when it first came out. I hated the fact that people were trying to compare it to my favorite movie at the time, Saving Private Ryan, I couldn't believe that any movie would ever surpass it, but I was wrong. Althought both movies are great, you really can't compare them. This movie is very different. It has a really good cast, with many talented actors. The plot is well written, and the beauty of the cinematography is unsurpassed, but the reason that I love about it, is the script. It is very poetic, and very surreal. It is more about a man's thoughts about life, and the nature of war. It was really a moving experience, and I love it for what it is. Unlike Saving Private Ryan, this movie has no agenda, it is a simple story of one man's struggle in all the madness of war, and how he finds beauty in such an awful setting. It is truly a classic war film, with not alot of violence, but with alot of emotion, and it leaves you thinking about the true nature of man and humanity, and how war effects us!
Rating:
Summary: A touching life lesson in a war between life and death.
Review: The story is much more than just a tale of men fighting a war in which some survive and others do not, in The Thin Red Line every man fights his own war. This motion picture is completely different from any other concerning war ever produced, for its deep psychoanalysis of those who are submitted to the horrors of war, their feelings and emotions. It doesn't matter who you are , in a war all are innocent like a child. There is nor heroes neither enemies, all are human beings. Despite its casual monotony for its 172 minutes, it is a touching life lesson in a war between life and death. With an original story, an spectacular cinematography and a profound and intense soundtrack, The Thin Red Line demonstrates how useless and senseless a war can be if we can live in peace. The Thin Red Line between peace and war.
Rating:
Summary: An intense, gripping and moving movie
Review: You either like this film or you dont but I loved it. It is a different film to Saving Private Ryan and there is no use in comparing the two as they are as different as any two war films could be.The Thin Red Line doesnt explode onto the screen like 'Ryan' did but slowly captures your emotions by seeing the characters as human beings struggling through the evil of war.The best remark I can say about this movie is that I dragged my wife to see it but she would be the first to go back and see it again. A Masterpiece to be seen even if its just say you didnt like it.
Rating:
Summary: One more vote for thumbs down
Review: Lots of ruminating over the evils of war and the fear of death set to brooding elevator music against a backdrop of promotional film from the South Pacific Tourism Bureau. One good scene, however: American soldiers charging into a Japanese-occupied hamlet. Absolutely gripping. I suppose the director's assistant was responsible for that one success. While the movie is not a total failure, it comes damn close. So save your time and money. The tragedy of this film is far more about missed artistic opportunities than it is about the Battle of Guadalcanal (of which we learn next to nothing from this movie, by the way). As is often the case, we are better off just reading the book.
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