The Thin Red Line

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Summary: Malick creates a haunting painting of the soul.
Review: with THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Mailick succeeds in creating a truly enormous and haunting masterpiece. The bottom line is this: Malick doesn't care about how realistic you think this creation is of war and violence, he'd rather blow that off completely and embody the violence of the soul in it's war between good and evil, heaven and hell. **Terrence Malcik doesn't care for hollywood, because he is not interested in an instant gratification, or, most importantly, creating a film simply about the realism of WAR, Terrence Malick does something 100 more times challenging by capturing the ache of the soul, in battle with it's self. Malick never expressed any desire to recreate WAR in it's finest detail, but to detail it's affect on the soul: oncfusion, hurt and self-reflection. (period)

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Summary: Cinematography unlike anything you've seen before
Review: Malick's movie is an altogether refreshing movie about ideas, subplots, and an ethereal exploration of things unseen. In short, it's a movie about humanity caught in the antithesis of war in a quite paradisiac environment. Think of National Geographic in, well, Bosnia at its worst, for example. People who perceive this movie as a waste of good actors simply don't get it at all: this is not a movie about actors (à la Hollywood 95% of the time) but rather perfectly exemplifies the disconnectedness of people as they are forced into a batallion for a little while, wondering, by the end, "Who are you? Who is it that I fought with?" Having watched Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line in the same evening on DVD, I finished the former feeling... well, not feeling much at all, to tell the unforetunate truth. Don't get me wrong: SPR is a stunning achievement - technically-speaking, and I recommend it to everyone. But then came this phantasmagorical cicrus of a movie that is TRL, which compels you to think - yes, to THINK! - not only about what one has seen, but also about the correlation of form and content. SPR is a movie whose purpose is the war itself; TRL, on the other hand, is a movie whose context is war but whose subject is something else altogether. It's an existential exploration, out of which viewers can reach very differing conclusions. One somewhat negative chord, however: Where's the theatrical trailer?

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Summary: extraorinary pictures from a brilliant director
Review: There's no sense to explain that movie. Just watch it and you will undestand my admiration

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Summary: The most spell-binding, earth shattering war movie ever made
Review: Stunning performances,charged,brutal battle sequences and a script worthy of any award, this touching masterpiece from Terrence Malik goes deeper than any war movie ever before it. The soldiers are tracked on their mission second by gruelling second as their degeneration into insanity is beautifully depicted by the main characters. The most notable performance was that of the usual comedian Ben Chaplin who moves the viewer as his story is told

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Summary: Best movie ever!
Review: A film has never stayed with me so much as TRL. I don't consider myself an artsy type so please don't throw me in that group just cuz i liked the movie. And for the person who put it down cuz it didn't follow the book. Thank god. Why would you want to make a movie just like the book? That's why they say based on..And jones writes prose like a jock writing a note to his girlfriend. I just wrote this cuz i fould that guy strange for hating a movie just cuz it wasn't like the novel..look at Lolita,the SHining

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Summary: Demanding and beautiful
Review: Films like this one are rare; some might say that's a good thing. However, most negative criticism of this film comes from people who obviously have expectations of what a film should be and demand a film to conform to those expections. That's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Yet Malick turns the tables on the audience with his adaption of Jones' novel. Rather than playing to the average moviegoer's expectations, as Spielberg did admittingly with Saving Private Ryan, or rehashing the brillant work of James Jones, Malick gives us a very demanding film that builds from a highly personal interpretation of the themes of the original novel into a creation that, while inevitably indebted to Jones's original work, is is something onto itself. And as an unexpected twist to all this movie seeks to accomplish, Malick, despite his detractors, takes to the task in a strikingly humble way, allowing the viewer to easily choose from him or herself to "take or leave' what Malick offers.

Malick does bring to the screen much of Jones' novel: humanity seemingly lost admist war, seen through a collage of individuals--each one wandering as solitary within the greater theater of army and warfare. As with Jones' novels, both this one and From Here to Eternity, this is not simply an extracting psychological expedition, but a roughly honest, unblinking look at the core of the whole--the "spark," as Albert Schweizter called it--of each individual. Gazing into human souls without the buffer of sentimentality never makes for comfortable entertainment, and following Jones' lead, Malick likewise does not apologize for what he throws into the audience's lap. While Malick may have taken liberties with plot and character details, he does prove himself to be a faithful student of Jones in exercising the very qualities that made Jones the powerful and effective artist that he was.

Watching this movie will demand attention and patience, and Malick will expect us not to be sqeamish or dull about the difficult spiritual, moral and philosophical questions that the human race has wrestled with since our earliest beginnings. The film carries out at a steady, slow pace, as though it is more a meditation than a movie, and seems to ask time and time again: With such beauty within and without us, why do we commit such horror upon ourselves? In a movie that seeks to show us humanity, that is perhaps one of the most enduring, most confounding, and most human of questions. Malick's only answer, a meek and simple one--too meek and simple for many a shallow critic--is too cling to the remenants of that beauty and to the memory of beauty which has past away. It is an answer that is found, Malick reveals to us, in the deepest of our human motivations and longings, and from it springs the quiet, gentle hope that, as the Russian genius Dostoesky phrased it, "beauty will save the world."

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Summary: very confusing
Review: I don't know about any of you people but I totally could not understand this movie.Even the beggining was confusing. About a half an hour into the movie I kept thinking "when is this movie going to be over!" After Saving Private Ryan(which I loved to death)this movie was very dispointing.

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Summary: A great movie!
Review: This movie is as good, if not better than Saving Private Ryan. I liked it because it showed the feeling of the men before, during, and after the battle. I really showed what the men felt. It was a little confusing in the beginning but the plot is figured out before the end. I believe most people who liked Saving Private Ryan will like this movie.

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Summary: My favorite, a movie that asks questions...
Review: This movie asks questions about life and specifically war. It goes into the minds of men involved in the war and the questions running through their heads, but does not force its audience to see it in any certain way and that's what I love about it.

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Summary: Made Me THINK
Review: Before television, we relied on radio for entertainment. Without a visual medium we were forced to imagine and think. When television came along we essentially discarded our imaginations. The screen became our autopilot. Private Ryan and TRL are like television and radio: one takes you on a guided tour through a calculated story filled with well-defined characters. The other forces you to sort some things out. The red line on a war map distinguishes areas of conflict from those of peace. PVT Witt straddled the line throughout the movie, in death as well as life. The native that walked past the soldiers without fear had apparently learned to cross the line without fear. TRL is a great movie, but if you're looking to be entertained I'd recommend Private Ryan.