The Thin Red Line

Rating:
Summary: This is the best American film of the decade.
Review: Haunting score, stunning cinematography, superb acting, a theme worthy of great art -- this is a perfect film set in a war -- with truth, love, sacrifice, compassion, fear, hope, brutality and honour as subjects. As Gene Siskel said, this is the best war film ever seen. Unlike "Saving Ryan's Privates", this is no propaganda film. No easy answers, no flag-waving, no liberal "the Japanese are just like us" nonsense, either (here, the Japanese are fully human, and distinctly themselves). I was moved by the sometimes tender, sometimes gruesome truths revealed in the course of watching ordinary men in a hopelessly chaotic circumstance -- war -- as each strives to keep from crossing the thin red line into insanity.

Malick stayed faithful to the excellent novels by James Jones, borrowing Prewitt from "From Here to Eternity" and blending him with Pvt. Witt from "The Thin Red Line" to give us Caviezel's central character, a man striving to serve his brothers, willing to kill if necessary and at the same time to be open to the pathos and horror that killing another man entails. Caviezel said he and his fellow actors felt like paint on a palette when working under Malick. The result is a wonderfully composed masterpiece which asks questions instead of giving pablum answers.

Nolte and Penn give among their very best performances, the Nolte and Koteas dialectics are the stuff of great drama, and the post-skirmish pas-de-deux between Nolte and Cusack is unsurpassed -- intense, subtle, telling.

The battle scene at the start of "Private Ryan" is stunning but ultimately it is pornographic -- we watch guys being blown up but we do so as voyeurs. In "The Thin Red Line", Malick's and John Toll's cameras place us in the midst of the men, the sea of grass, the bullets and shrapnel, the mud and gore, the birds and plant life, the thunder and smoke. We are deeply affected, not "entertained" or thrilled but stunned, jolted and transformed. Hans Zimmer's sometimes melancholy, sometimes poignant, sometimes uplifting but always unobtrusive score helps weave the fabric of this film into a fine visual, emotional, intellectual and auditory tapestry.

Some critics bemoan the nature scenery -- well, Guadalcanal is a tropical island, that's where the battle was fought, and that's what the soldiers saw, get it? Some say the film was too long -- so, get an attention span, eh? Some don't like the voice-overs, which in fact serve masterfully to let us into the hearts and minds of those waiting to fight and waiting to die. Some were offended by the fact that GIs were portrayed as being concerned with profound questions about meaning, truth, hope, God. Guess what -- ordinary people actually ARE capable of thinking about such things when facing their own mortality. And our history is replete with poet soldiers -- Horace over two millenia ago for one, and James Jones himself at Guadalcanal.

I, for one, am grateful for a film that dares to be a great work of art. Every time I've seen it -- and that's quite a few -- a fifth of the audience stays seated to the end of the credits, reverent, thinking, feeling, often weeping. Dozens of my friends from all backgrounds have gone back to see this film again and then again.

This is a rare phenomenon, and like Malick's other films, will be more fully appreciated as the years go by. More than "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven", though, this film will be timeless.

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest films ever
Review: Art is expression. Movies have always distanced themselves form this by means of studio money mongers and the need for massive audiences. This film is the first mainstream movie to completely break free of the mentality that a motion picture can only be novel-like stories. This movie is different, it is a combination of poetry and visuals that carry an almost blank-verse beat of their own. The movie is haunting and resonant. I have never seen a movie that depicted so many issues and philosophies of love, war, life, death, heaven, earth, people, society,murder, survival, sacrifice, and the eternal search for a meaning to it all in an Eden like paradise that is torn by the living hell that is war. The film is less about nature vs. man than it is about man finding his place between this world and the next. Of course there is no conclusion, only questions, but thus is life. The battle intensity is equal to that of 'Private Ryan' yet detatched. This piece of art is the artists creation, despite the great actors scattered throughout it. The characters are impersonal to us because they represent US. Each embodies our rawest emotions. The film itself is beautiful and challenges the audience with thoughts, not raw imagery like the almost great 'Private Ryan. In fact, there is a similar story of a man's sacrifice and search for meaning in it, but presented in an almost opposite manner. A beautiful movie that comes closer to a work of pure art than any other.

Rating:
Summary: WHAT A WASTE
Review: What a waste of my time and an interesting cast. While picking up Clooney's The Peacemaker on DVD, I spotted this movie and got it also. When I got around to finally watching it, I was thoroughly disappointed. What a meandering, unfocused waste of celluloid. I was hoping that Clooney would show up and things would pick up but that was not to be. He shows up right near the end (of a 170 minute film) and has about a minute of mostly backround dialogue (and even less screen time). What a shell game. I will give this movie it's props for being beautifully filmed and having a good soundtrack. I can only hope that's what 5 of it's 7 AA nominations were for (somebody was smoking dope or accepting pay-offs to have nominated this dog for Best Picture and Malick for Best Director). Was 1998 that much of of a wasteland? Brody, Caviezel, Chaplin, Clooney, Cusack, Harrelson, Kotas, Nolte, Penn, and Reilly deserve better then this. I hope that they were well payed to have this disappointment take up space on their resume. Better them then me.

Rating:
Summary: The summit of cinema
Review: TTRL is Terence malick's adaptation of James Jones justly famous ww2 novel.Set in Guadelcanal,it tells the stories of many men, from captains to privates as they begin this assault.Rarely,if ever, have I encouneterd such meditative beauty in a film. Not surprising that Speilbergs john wayne opus saving private ryan was better received.the comparisons between the 2 are odious,and irrelevant. This is a movie that 3o years fron now people will still be examining,probing. The cinematography is simeply Brilliant, the acting from the magnificent Sean penn,through a surprising Woody Harrelson,are uniformly excellent. The soundtrack, haunting,hauntinglelanesian chants,will stay will you for quite awhile.The poening 20 minutes of the film can be seen repetedly,for it is almost a tone poem.Mallick may or may nor make another movie.He has filmed his masterpiece, a movie I truly feel that can stand on almost any level with any movie I have ever seen.Do yourself a huge favor and watch this movie.It will pay great dividends.

Rating:
Summary: All about Reflection
Review: "That movie was boring", I heard the lady say, "it was too much like a documentary."

The lady was half way right, it does play like a documentary. But that's what sets it apart from other war movies. Quite opposite from it's counterpart (Saving Pt. Ryan, which was also made that year) this movie investigates the internal struggle, the soul- searching of the men who fought for our country. People complain about the lack of action in this film. My complaint is that many war movies get so involved in action that the charachters are forgotten. This movie is different ,though. It shows us the waiting time, while soliders questioned their actions, reflected upon themselves, or thought about home. This movie doesn't go anywhere, but then again life doesn't either sometimes. Sean Penn and Nick Nolte are at their best, as you've never seen them before. Many performances barely register( George Clooney, John Travolta). Still others shall move you quite profoundly, more so each time you watch this movie.( Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin, John Cusack) Unlike many movies, this will stay in your mind forever, this one shows what war is about.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: As a Vietnam veteran I can sense from this film many of the thoughts and feelings I had while in combat. There was one major difference though. The men in company C in this portrayal trained and lived together for some time prior to this assault on Guadalcanal. Our units in Vietanm were constantly changing as personnel rotated in and out, thereby denying us any long term comaraderie. I too lived through the memories of my life before the war while in combat, remembering what it was like to be 'normal'. War changes you in ways that I do not believe have been adequately addressed in any major films to date. Each in it's own way has it's strengths and weaknesses. This film however touches your soul. There are so many scenes in this film that can cause a flashback, the reality of war and combat come true. There is a certain sense of credibility here. It is not so much any one thing as it is the little things this film exposes. The details are of such magnitude that they actually expand on a given situation more than you might feel comfortable.

Rating:
Summary: More Relevant Now than When It Debuted in 1998
Review: I saw "The Thin Red Line" on its opening day, Christmas of 1998, at the classic Coronet Theater in the heart of San Francisco. When the film ended it took time for my mind to begin digesting what it had just experienced. It seemed that half the people leaving the theater at the end of the film acted as if they had just been touched by a vision from God; the other half were shaking their heads in disappointment over not being served up a more gung-ho, colored-by-the-numbers, Ramboesque war film.

In the late 1990's (in the era of what I've come to call the "Pax Clintonia) it was hard to imagine our country ever being in a war again with the likes that we've seen in this Spring of 2004--with battles marked by ugly guerilla warfare and attrition of a scale not seen by US forces since Vietnam.

Now amidst an era of full-scale war "The Thin Red Line" resounds even more powerfully than when it first came out. I can only believe that it speaks directly to the fears and struggles of the fighters on both sides of the current Iraq conflict--whether they be troops of the US and our allies, or those who oppose us from the anti-coalition side. As well as to the non-combatants caught up in all of the hell of this war as well.

In the discussions over "The Thin Red Line" it is often compared and contrasted to the other big 1998 war film "Saving Private Ryan". I think it is fair to do so as it is to compare and contrast different pieces of, say, literature.

I still do admire "Saving Private Ryan" (at least from afar) and cannot discount the views of those who like it better than "The Thin Red Line" and believe that Spielberg's film falls more within their vision of what a war movie should be. For me, however, the effect of "SPR" has receded within me as time passes. Though it is an extremely well-made film, what strikes me is the sheer conventionality of so many of the plot elements in "SPR". I mean haven't we seen so much of what happens in "SPR" before, in classic World War II film after film such as "The Longest Day" and "Battleground"--but with a new layer of realistic gore for the 1990's? This is one reason why "SPR" never truly entered my psyche the way "The Thin Red Line" did.

And speaking of the bloodshed I do agree with the assessments of those that see something somewhat voyeuristic about some of the scenes of anatomically-detailed violence in "SPR". I think that this sort of violence marred and unnecessarily distracted from otherwise fine films like "Blackhawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers". Scenes practically designed to make the audience exclaim, "Ooh, look at what just happened to that guy's hand!"

The violence in "The Thin Red Line", in contrast, NEVER feels exploitive--and never has a hint of "war pornography". Instead "TTRL" has a uniformly mournful, tragic tone. A sensibility that is not cynical, sardonic, and mean-spirited towards the world as in "Full Metal Jacket" by Stanley Kubrick (whose work some people compare Terrence Malick's with), but sorrowful about the tragedy built right into the fabric of a world that has never known a time without war. And Malick does not single out anyone as a true villain (even Nick Nolte's Colonel Tall is shown as a self-loathing man in his voice-overs); he simply says that this is the way of life, laments all this suffering--and poses many more questions than he tries to provide answers about why nature and the universe are so cruel in this way.

So many of the images in "The Thin Red Line" will live with me till the day I die. For instance all of the sequences involving Ben Chaplin's character (Private Bell) and his beautiful wife (played by Miranda Otto). I still feel the spell of the particularly striking scene where the camera is upside-down so that Mrs. Bell appears to be swinging into the sky like an intangible sylph that cannot be held onto--and indeed she eventually becomes lost from the arms of Private Bell, the one person or thing that has kept him going through all blood and destruction all around him.

The scene of Private Witt's demise also stands out--Jim Caviezel's entire presence in the film itself a stand-out. For me it represents idealism destroyed by crushing reality but also the hope that there is something spiritually transcendent beyond death.

And the last shot of the coconut sprouting up one new baby palm--a "life moves on" image that at first left me somewhat befuddled when I first saw the movie--has now indelibly joined the pantheon of haunting film endings for me. All of the chaos and insanity and horror that have preceded this final scene have ebbed away and left on the beach a brief fleeting moment of gentleness and tranquility.

If some movies are fast food this ambitious, poetic, multi-dimensional film on the other hand is a gourmet meal created by a master chef that takes many visits to fully savor and appreciate its different courses. As I evolve, as I age I experience something fuller and deeper each time I revisit this film that only grows ageless with the passing years--whose impact we find in full force during this time of war.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting and poetic, but flawed.
Review: 'The Thin Red Line' is yet another haunting and poetic film from a great visionary of American cinema; Terrance Malick. Certain scenes are just awesome and mind-blowing and will send shivers up your spine. It is different from many other war movies, but it is flawed because it has no real story. Nonetheless, worth the watch.

Rating:
Summary: worst war film no doubt
Review: I swear most of this people who have put these reviews must not have seen this movie of seen some other version because this movie was some of the worst acting i have seen from great actors. The movie is extremely boring if you just want to see hardcore action the whole time for 3 hours go ahead and buy but if you want more of a storyline go for something like enemy at the gates or apocalypse now or hamburger hill. At first its a little entertaining but after an hour of it u start to get hungry and start wondering if theres anything on tv to watch.
I think the movie was made for more the actors pleasure then the audiences.

After the review of the movie i usually give a synopsis of the storyline but there really isnt one what you see is what you get.

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Rating:
Summary: THIN RED LINE? NO, THIN STORY LINE
Review: What a waste of time and an all-star cast. While picking up Clooney's The Peacemaker on DVD, I spotted this movie and remembered who all was in it. When I got around to finally watching it, I was thoroughly disappointed. What a meandering, unfocused waste of celluloid. I was hoping that things would pick up once Clooney appeared but that was not to be. He shows up right near the end (of a 170 minute film) and has about a minute of mostly backround dialogue (and even less screen time). What a shell game. I will give this movie it's props for being beautifully filmed and having a good soundtrack. I can only hope that's what 5 of it's 7 AA nominations were for (somebody was smoking dope or taking pay-offs to have nominated this dog for Best Picture and Malick for Best Director). Was 1998 that much of of a wasteland? Obviously so. Brody, Caviezel (who dies in this one too), Chaplin, Clooney, Cusack, Harrelson, Kotas, Nolte, Penn, and Reilly deserve better then this. I only hope that the actors were all well payed to have this turkey take up space on their resumes. Thin Story Line is more like it.