The Thin Red Line

Rating:
Summary: Poetry before Storytelling, Art before Commerce.
Review: That Terrence Malick is incapable of coherent characterisation, or storytelling, has been the critical consensus that has prevailed for over 20 years: "Malick puts visuals ahead of storytelling, poetry ahead of coherent characterisation, philosophical rumination ahead of thematic development". Those who seek to appraise Malick's work, aptly point out that Malick lacks the great artist's arrangement of complex effects, which is certainly true. We look to Kubrick for exquisite grouping of devices; Malick's figure in the carpet is a much simpler one. What it consists of - the very thing that critics fail to detect - is a structure of striking contrasts. The impression that most people take home from The Thin Red Line is a "succession of sharply-outlined pictures". His film, nonetheless is not simply a succession of pictures. It is a sustained structural whole. Every Malick critic concurs in this mistaken notion that The Thin Red Line is nothing more than "a series of episodic scenes" but not one critic has yet undertaken a analysis of Malick's work to see how the sequences of tableau are constructed.

One of the many themes of The Thin Red Line is that man's salvation lies in change, in spiritual growth. It is only by immersion in the flux of experience that man becomes disciplined and develops in character, conscience or soul. The film is about a battle, but it is a symbolic battle. A battle that represents life at its most intense flux, and it, therefore, exploits the greatest possibilities for change. To say that The Thin Red Line is a study in fear is as shallow an interpretation as to say that it is a narrative of the battle of Guadalcanal. It is not just "the overriding dramatic impulse to kill the other guy". It is not about the combat of armies, it is about the self-combat of the soldiers who fear and stubbornly resist change and spiritual growth. But through immersion in violence, make essential discoveries about themselves, and nature.

Theme and style in The Thin Red Line are organically conceived, the theme of change, is just one of many, conjoined with the fluid style by which it is evoked. Fluidity and change characterise the whole film. Malick's style, calculated to create confused impressions of change and motion, is deliberately disconnected and disordered. He interjects disjointed details, one non sequitur melting into another. Scenes and objects are felt blurred; everything shifts in value. Yet everything has relationship to the total structure; everything is manipulated into contrapuntal cross-references of meaning. Malick puts film language to poetic uses, which, to define it, is to use elements of film language reflexively and to use visuals symbolically. It is the works which employ this use of film language that constitute what is permanent of Malick.

The Thin Red Line juxtaposes sequences of tremendous, visceral impact, and violence, with quiet scenes of contemplation. The violence, when it does come, is a web of mental commotion, confusion, and change externalised in the mighty altercation of men and guns and nature itself. In the onslaught, explosions throw men into the air and each other. They wither under the heavy gun fire, blood splatters on the camera lens (jarring us from the fictional world) , the explosions become strange blooming red blossoms of fire and smoke. From a few feet above, the camera rushes, rakes, soars over the floor of green. This, and similar motifs, become central to the film.

The use of colour in The Thin Red Line is rather bright compared to the drab colours that surround most cinema battlefields. The environment is beautifully saturated with bright colour that emphasizes the natural surroundings, which are a big focus of Malick's direction. The central pillars of the film are its cinematography and soundtrack. Each scene has its own inner beauty, whether due to the light, the awesome scenery or something else, which is breathtaking, like the image of the cloud suspended like an island at dusk, or the dogs feasting on human remains. These are just two fragments from the torrent of overwhelming images. The terrific atmosphere relies on more than just pictures and abstract images though - there are times of no dialogue, just the flow of streams and the whisper of the breezes through the grassy hills.

Malick's language, is the language of symbol and paradox. For example, the image of the infant bird that is floundering, and struggling on the ground, is unsettling as a symbol for the spectator. It is symbolic, and creates a paradox for us. The image, allows us to put the situation of the dying soldiers into sharp-relief as they struggle to deal with their situation, and become corrupted by the violence. Later in the film, the voice-over narration invites us to recall this image, and add to its possible meaning, or to the paradox it creates.

There are many binary elements in The Thin Red Line, that are built into Malick's nonnarrative and narrative to show the paradox within nature, and human nature. The crocodile entering green algae covered water, dogs eating human carrion, have roundly been damned as non-functional figures, but what seems artificial and irrelevant to Malick's critics is only because they have been lifted out of context. Like any other images, they have to be related to the structure of meaning which they function. What any of these images mean fundamentally is open to debate.

Malick's poetry has been seen as banal by some critics, but lifts the film to the near great. Furthermore it suggests another telltale significance, one that is applicable to Malick himself. What is readily recognisable in the paradox above, is that irony of opposites which constitutes the personality of the man who made it. It is the subjective correlative of his own plight. It symbolises his personal outlook on life - a life that is filled with ironic contradictions. The enigma of the man is symbolised in his enigmatic style.

Rating:
Summary: BETTER THAN SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
Review: I am disappointed at some of the negative comments about this movie. I understand them, however. These people probably wanted a rehash of Saving Private Ryan or the traditional war movie. If that is what you seek in this movie, you will not get it. This is a great movie for the same eason Apocalypse Now is a great movie. It presents the story of the Battle for Guadalcanal in a more philosophical fashion than is seen in most war movies. You have to have a deeper sense of understanding to enjoy this movie. If you just want blood and guts, watch Saving Private Ryan or the Sands of Iwo Jima.

Rating:
Summary: PhD or no PhD
Review: Reading these reviews is a great example of how if you feed people enough bad art, they will not only like it, but they will yearn for more. Even more interestingly, they will reject good art if given the choice. It is unfortunate that people feel the need to trash a movie for almost no reason. Usually it's something personal. My mother will sit through a good movie for 2 hours and absolutely enjoy herself, but if she doesn't like the ending, she'll call complain about how bad it was. With TRL, I think most people who didn't like it felt insulted or tricked or just plain frustrated. It's always easier to blame the movie than to blame yourself. It doesn't make you dumb to not get the movie. And you can make any movie sound stupid by oversimplifying the theme and inserting negative connotations (i.e. ooh bird and some natives - big deal) Unfortunately, there is no PhD offered for good art so to qualify oneself as a qualified interpreter of art based on having a PhD is a little silly. TRL is a high minded movie, and most people won't connect with it. That's the bottom line. I don't like comparisons to Saving Private Ryan, because they are two different movies. Ryan was a true masterpiece on a standard movie Intro Plot Development Climax format, but conceptually, Spielberg is not even capable of creating a movie like TRL. It's definitely out there and raises a lot of questions, and to all the PhD's and geniuses out there, there was more symbolism and tie ins than the just birds, trees and crocodiles. It would be nice to think that our soldiers are these fearless Rambo type machines, and I can't doubt that there are some. But being sent out to almost certain death is going to bring out fear of God in any man, training or no training. Any living creature's instinct is to survive, to live and avoid death at any cost. I thought Malik did a fantastic job of portraying the emotions and inner battles of the soldiers. In conclusion, I think that this is one of the best films I have ever seen. I don't know if it's that your favorite character died, or that you don't like soldiers being portrayed as the young boys that they were or that the realization of mortality is very personal experience or what, but to call this a bad film, even if you didn't like it, almost instantly erases all credibility and validity of your reviews. If you like true movie making, TRL is for you. If you like bad movies, there's plenty out there for you. It's good to see that true art still surfaces in Hollywood from time to time.

Rating:
Summary: Damn the Academy !!!
Review: God this should have won some awards. I'm really starting to get sick of reading all of the negative reviews for this picture by people who were looking for some kind of blood & guts flag waving shoot em up to take their grandparents to & impress them w/their knowledge of world events. Saving Private Ryan is kind of like the McDonalds of war pictures: filtered for a mass market w/o making them question anything or even think for that matter. To even mention that movie in the same breath as The Thin Red Line is like bringing the 9th Symphony down to the level of the Backstreet Boys.

Rating:
Summary: In the words of those who were there . . .
Review: "If this were a movie, this would be the end of the show and something would be decided. In a movie or a novel they would dramatize and build to the climax of the attack. When the attack came in the film or novel, it would be satisfying. It would decide something. It would have a semblance of meaning and a semblance of an emotion. And immediately after, it would be over. The audience could go home and think about the semblance of the meaning and feel the semblance of the emotion. Even if the hero got killed, it would still make sense. Art, Bell decided, creative art--was shit. (From _The Thin Red Line_ by James Jones, veteran of the Americal Division)

"When we brought airplanes into the sweating jungle islands of the Pacific we stepped back thousands of years. We brought the latest aircraft, the most modern mechanical flying wonders from the most mechanical-minded country in the world, equipped them with trained, expert technicians both on the ground and in the air, and then dumped everything into a primitive green sea of trees where a canoe's outrigger was a device of marvelous ingenuity.... This from the beginning was the difference between the war against the Japanese in the Southwest Pacific and any war we were fighting or ever had fought anywhere else -- the country itself, its whole unbearable strangeness and unfamiliarity, its sense of entire removal from anything we had ever known. The country itself had to be met, figured out, overcome, and only after that could we turn our attention to a tough, savage enemy who already was there, who already was entrenched and protected within it... The Pacific to us was ancient beyond understanding... There was nothing there for us when we arrived but the jungle. The impact of the jungle was in many ways greater than the impact of the enemy. We fought trees and swamps and mountains and disease and strange flying things and insects and crazy noises more than we ever fought the Japs...From the time that our fighting men left Australia until the time they arrived in the Phillippines, more than two years later, they lived in a jungle nightmare, a poisonous, lush, terrible summation of all the unknowns, all the terrors. There were no cities, only grass shacks; and when some of the men finally got to the Philippines they looked at a two-story stucco house with unbelieving eyes. There were no welcoming natives, nobody who ever felt he had been liberated, no girls to cling to jeeps, no cheers, no welcoming flags. Just painful, exhausting, creeping through the jungle, where this year's fighting seemed the same as last year's and where the distances were so great the end never seemed in sight... (from "The Setting--Into a Strange, Wierd World" by Capt Donald Hough and Capt Elliott Arnold, from _Big Distance_, 1945)

"War doesn't make much of a dent in this strange, beautiful, sinister country. Grass is already springing up in big holes in the ground, and in three more months you'd never guess they were bomb craters. Beside the road are burned stores and munitions dumps, where you can still find Jap rifle ammunition, machine guns, radios, transformer units, shells, reels of copper wire, and occasional tin hat, grenades and mortar bombs. But over this wreckage, vines are already trailing and vivid wild flowers are sprouting. Farther along the road is a grove of coconut trees different from all the millions of others because the fronds were brown and dead and bore no nuts. Beneath one, among some promiscuously tangled plants with scarlet blossoms, was a Jap skeleton overlooked by burial parties...Nature plays no favorites among the dead. His empty eye sockets gazed up at the same riotous color as covered the nearby grave of an Australian sergeant. The same green and blue butterflies, big as sparrows, fluttered over both. Along the narrow path, pushing the undergrowth aside, we made our way reflecting how easily this peaceful place, vivid with flame trees and hibiscus could be made the scene of deadly ambush..." (from "There's Just More Bloody New Guinea," R. K. Palmer, Newsweek Jan '43)

I also highly recommend that anyone interested in the mess that was "Operation Shoestring" read both Richard Frank and Samuel Eliot Morrison, but particularly the illustrated Army History of Guadalcanal by John Miller, Jr.

Rating:
Summary: Boring, Dull, Stupid.....
Review: In "Saving Private Ryan", the first scene is an american flag waving in the breeze, followed by a shot of a massive graveyard at Normandy. Immediatley after, we bear witness to one of the finest movie scenes ever, as the movie introduces you to the horror and despair of combat. In "The thin red line", the first scene is a crocodile, then some natives swimming, then 2 deserters talking with the natives. Need I say more???

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Riveting....
Review: From the start, you know that this is one of the worst films ever made, and it's mesmerisingly bad. Gee, isn't it weird how Japanese with machine guns can't hit american targets but the Americans with single action rifles can sharpshoot them at a moments notice. And for some guys terrified at the thought of combat, they sure don't seem very concerned to me if they have the time to have poetic notions in the midst of battle. It's an insult to mention this film in the same sentance as "Saving Private Ryan".

Rating:
Summary: An incredible Epic
Review: When i saw Saving Private Ryan some years ago, i was amazed by the amazing fight sequences. The, some months later I saw the Thin Red Line, and well, it finally hit me. There is no greater horror than the onw trapped in our hearts, and it was that this movie was all about. This men were so full of fear and confusion that they actually just wanted to sruvive to go back where it was safe, i.e. Ben Chaplin thinking about his wife, she was the only thing that kept him going, without giving up. Its a superb film, even better than Saving Private Ryan, because it finally makes you realize what is really happening in a more deadly war, each persons inner war

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic photography.
Review: The photography in this film is fantastic, but that's about all it has to offer. Malick's attempt to philosophize was didn't seem to come off as far as I was concerned, and if he spent twenty years preparing and making this film I feel it was time wasted. I guess the only War movie that's ever going to hit the mark is Saving Private Ryan. However, any aspiring filmmaker shoudl see the Thin Red Line for its photographic conent if for nothing else.

Rating:
Summary: One word for this movie, Phenomenal.
Review: Many people who saw this movie were disappointed and didn't enjoy the film, but honestly this movie took a different aspect of war and perfected it and created just a world,of the utmost beauty. This is a movie of genuine quality, this movie was was how movies need to be made, it was real and you don't find too many movies that are real. Thin Red Line was one of the best war movies since "Apocalpse Now" and to me that's hard to beat. It's was sensational. But a reminder I guarantee anyone who watches this movie for the first time will not like it, but once you walk away from the movie and start thinking about it your going to get an urge to see it again, then the second time your gonna love it and you'll begin to appreciate the art of the film. This movie dealt not just with the physical war but the mental war that goes on inside a person's mind when surrounded by a chaotic situation. But also, if your not into imagery you may not like the film. But if you just have an open mind you'll enjoy this film, I sure did. And one more thing Jim Caviezel gave an EXCELLENT performance in this movie. And this movie had GREAT cinematography. Check out you will enjoy-Thank you