The Thin Red Line

Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?

The Thin Red Line is Terrence Malick's awfully underrated 1998 World War II film. He made this movie after a twenty year hiatus from directing. Now, if Malick were some mediocre director, this twenty year sabbatical wouldn't be such a big deal. But Malick directed two astonishing films back in the 70s (Badlands, Days of Heaven) and then...disappeared.

Well actually he didn't disappear, he was in Paris, fed up with the Hollywood studios. Finally, he made his comeback with this magnificent but relatively ignored war film, a psychological journey into the minds of a group of American soldiers swarming Guadalcanal. It had top name actors begging for the smallest of roles. Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rouke, and other big names participated in the film and never even got put in the final cut.

I personally haven't read the James Jones' novel, of the same name (or seen the 1964 version of this movie, for that matter), but I hear it's more "inspiration" for this movie than anything else. The movie certainly has a plot, the American soldiers trying to take an essential Japanese position on the mountain, in the battle of Guadalcanal. But the plot doesn't run the movie, that's the important thing. The plot comes second.

Not everybody will enjoy The Thin Red Line . Whenever any film tries to be at least somewhat intellectual, a band of cynics will pop out of their hiding place in the rainforest, and call it pretentious. It's not a simple movie. If you don't particularly enjoy thinking, go watch another war movie, where you'll see more blowing up and dead guys.

This film has narration. And narration. And narration. This film is narration. Malick loves his non-diagetic sound, we see plenty of it in about ten different narrators throughout the film, as it switches from one to another to another and back. In a few situations it's difficult to be certain which one of the characters is doing the actual voice-over.

We don't have a main character; we certainly aren't seeing the war from just one man's point of view. Hell, we don't even have a single celebrity we can zone in on (and perhaps subconsciously assign the lead role). We've got Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte and John Travolta (among many others worth mentioning). Everybody's a supporting character. Everybody.

We don't have a central point of reference, and so we can't think of each character in relation to this central point, and so we're forced to to think of each character on their own. And that's awful hard when we're switching from one to another so often. Quotes like this start to make sense on more than one level:

"What difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?"

What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power but two?

Is it man against nature? Nature against nature? Man against man? All of the above. In the film, we're destroying nature in the process of destroying ourselves. Nature is harsh, cruel and efficient. Crueler than us. There's no such thing as mercy. The characters can quite unhypocritically talk about nature's cruelty while in the middle of a war.

"Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything. Nature's cruel, Staros."

This film may not look as good as Malick's previous Days of Heaven, but that's like saying the romance flick you just say in theaters wasn't as good as Casablanca. Days of Heaven is as good as they get visually, just about every frame in that movie could be enlarged and displayed as a photograph in some fancy art gallery. He doesn't reach that level in The Thin Red Line, for a good reason too (this being a war movie and all), but he gets pretty damn close. Somehow, his shot of an alligator looks much better than your average shot of an alligator. Well, when you shoot over a million feet of film for your movie, you're bound to get some pretty pictures, right?

Now, the animals are nice and symbolic, but what really does it for this film are scenes in the tall grass. Without that abnormally green grass and blue sky, this movie would be half of what it is. Malick is a painterly director. We're in a war here, but we're also on an (otherwise) idyllic island. The movie might not be as realistic as some war movies, because of all of this style Malick inflicts on the film. But really, in this film the actual war isn't as important as the concept of war. It's a poetic film. The soldiers are shown wandering this wonderful scenery (mostly shot in Australia) just as often as they're shown trying to kill Japanese.

What is this great evil? How did it steal into the world? From what seed, what root did it spring? Who's doing this? Who's killing us? Robbing us of light and life? Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known?

The Thin Red Line was overshadowed by Saving Private Ryan, plain and simple. Which one is better is always up for debate and personal taste, and when comparing two movies of such quality, the word "better" is unsuitable. Saving Private Ryan was more the epitome of a war movie, philosophically questioning war itself with battle scenes like we've never seen packed with special effects that were often a bit too real. The Thin Red Line was more experimental in genre, and much less of a typical war movie.

Spielberg turned Saving Private Ryan into a work of grandeur, Malick made The Thin Red Line introspective. Both were long World War II movies. Saving Private Ryan was released half a year earlier. Saving Private Ryan won the audiences. And they both lost to Shakespeare in Love for Best Picture.

"I love you, Will, beyond poetry."

Feh.

• Best Cinematography
• Best Director
• Best Film Editing
• Best Music (Scoring)
• Best Picture
• Best Sound
• Best Writing (Adapted)