The Thin Red Line

Here is something great and startling -- not necessarily the kind of comforting, consensus-creating film that wins Oscars, but unquestionably a movie that will live in the history of the medium.

As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached.

Misshapen but magnificent vision of a soulful quest -- in the thick of misery and fear -- for the meaning of our lives.

The Thin Red Line attempts to soar much nearer to the sun than "Ryan." Its imagery aims at our souls. It wrestles with complexity, speaks to us in poetry, weaves multiple narrative strands into a tapestry, opens the festering wounds of war and gazes inside without blinking.

The director is a poet of images.

A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess.

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

A movie and director that I often think about. Such beautiful shots and voice over work. Terrence is the best. Top 5 ever directors.

Very different war film with good visuals and acting, and a contemplative bent.

Terrence Malick is probably one of the few American cinematographers who understand Tarkovsky's "sculpting in/of time" definition of cinema and the imperative to infuse poetry in the medium. He understands cinema is not there to "tell a story". That's what books do. He smartly understands that to show the inanity of war, and existence as a whole, he can't go down the easy way, that is the ultra-realistic, audience-pandering and shall we say almost pornographic "saving private Ryan" way. However, he struggles to coherently bring his very good ideas to the screen. Too many voice overs show that he needs words, as a crutch, to help viewers understand his philosophy on war. Few scenes are really "beautiful" or will stay with us for long, as Apocalypse Now managed to do. It seems his genius was to cast Jim Caviezel - aka Jesus of passion of the Christ- as his main character, a modern Alexei Karamazov, a soldier-monk, whose blue gaze just illuminates each of his scene with a form of saintly beatitude and echoes his scene in the lagoon. The vast blue yonder, not the thin red line....

It's a hard slog, there is something odd with the non stop use of the word glory. The flash backs to the wife are well stale at best and pointless at worst. A very shallow attempt at an anti war film.

This film is more entertaining than a 3 hour delay at Heathrow,,, but only marginally. If the film were edited down to the scenes with humans in (or better still to those where they actually have something to do or say!) then you would be left with a powerful 60 mins. Sadly, the director has self-indulgently bloated it out with hour after tedious hour of rivers, dolphins, trees, fields, sunsets (sun-rises..). A shot of a field or a mountain has told me everything it can after 5 to 10 seconds, so why am I forced to stare at it for another minute and a half!? Clearly some arty farty space-cadet types like it, but I suspect the common mortal like myself, will lose the will to live long before the half-way point.