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When we first are introduced to Sean Penn’s 1st Sgt. Welsh by the christian pvt. Witt, we think he is a mean and hallow man, cynical in every turn. When we first meet Staros, the captain– we are lead to believe he is a coward and unfit to carry his men through the hell that waits for them.

“You still see the light?”

The movie broods on and we realize through our own experience of the story that what we first thought wasn’t the truth. You were wrong. “I might be the best friend you ever had. You just don’t know it”.

Welsh is an incredible and heroic older brother. Witt and Welsh are brothers, it’s simple once you realize this. And Staros is a kind and loving father who saves them from a stupid death, “You are all my sons. You live inside me now”. The soldiers admit they were wrong about him and ache to see him pulled away.

This is in fact the most hideously beautiful thing I have ever seen. Terrence Malik is an artist with the camera and this film has the biggest contrast between breathtaking visuals and the horrors of war. I could really talk all day about the assaulting visuals present here. The 3 hours is extremely deserved and portrays exactly what Malik wanted. Like all of Malik’s films you could be completely content in just watching the film on mute and soaking up each well crafted scene. It truly is one of the most well crafted war films ever made.

Also alike to Malik’s other films, this one has a doesn’t have a story which is as brilliantly developed as the cinematography. It does have extremely profound voice overs and a very captivating plot, there’s just no way they compare to the cinematography which is on a whole different level. It’s a movie which is needed to be seen on blu ray, and needs to be seen by any cinema fanatic who enjoys the craftsmanship of a brilliant director.

At the core of The Thin Red Line are the devestating and emotionally charged performances of the all-star ensemble cast with Sean Penn, Nick Nolte and Jim Caviezel standing out in particular. The physically and emotionally demanding performances of the actors are right at the foundation of the films beauty and unprecedented power. The story itself is very simplistic, but the insights into the minds of the characters break it up perfectly and it doesn’t even feel as long as it actually is.

And then there are of course the combat scenes. Malick’s direction is expertly fired in and out of these scenes, obviously essential to war movies. The ambient sound behind each of these scenes are perfecly included which makes it even more dramatic and powerful than it would normally be. Along with the powerful cinematography and glorious camera work by Malick, everything is set for a perfect war movie and that is exactly what it is. A war masterpiece and one of the greatest war movies I have ever seen.

Acted, edited and filmed to perfection. This is the second greatest war movie I have ever seen, only falling behind Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now.

If you remember back to ‘97, this came out roughly around the same time as “Saving Private Ryan”, which is by all means a sprawling, realistic account of the European Theater (D-Day in particular), but “The Thin Red Line” doesn’t belong in the same equation, it’s haunting multiple narrators, questioning the base motives behind fear, love, nature, beauty, war, and evil make it less an action war film than a poetic rumination on life, death, and afterlife. It’s a stunning film.

Pure, unfiltered, raw emotion. That is what’s front and center in Terrence Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’s autobiographical novel The Thin Red Line. The term itself may describe a thinly spread line of defense holding position in war, but I think the metaphor towards a man’s tenuous grasp on humanity is also apt. It’s a battle for Guadalcanal during World War II, an island being used as an airstrip by the Japanese and a crucial piece of property for the Allied forces to halt the enemy’s Pacific advancement. Property becomes a key term amongst what occurs in the almost three-hour film sprawling forth. The men in charge see a target and they see an endgame, the cost of getting there never much more than an afterthought. Every solider running through the jungle with machinegun fire raining down knows how important the mission is; some take it with courage while others in fear inducing stomach pains. Most of these men are young, unaware of the life awaiting back home or the future they are paving for generations to come. It therefore falls on the officers to lead them into the abyss and the men to risk everything in order to climb out.

One of the more important dynamics at play comes from James Caviezel’s Pvt. Witt and Sean Penn’s 1st Sgt. Edward Walsh. Here are two men on opposite sides of the psychological construct of what they are doing. Witt is a free spirit, willing to go AWOL in search of the joy life can bring, finding indigenous people to live amongst without the worry of the destruction not far enough away. Walsh, on the other hand, knows his role and knows his men. To him, one man will not win or lose this war—victory or defeat rests on the shoulders of the collective. When he finds Witt on his most recent sabbatical, Walsh realizes court-martialing him will do no good. His absence from the front lines won’t sacrifice success, but his inclusion in the force at a lesser position could bolster the whole. So, Witt becomes part of the medic team to sew stitches and help when needed, but he is too proud and strong-willed to settle for that. He never left the men as a way to desert, or save his own skin; he has a bond with the boys and he wants to stand by them in the fight to not only prove to Walsh he isn’t a screw-up, but also to show himself there is still hope to be found amidst the vacuum waiting.

When you have a Lt. Col. itching for a win after fifteen years rising through the ranks only to stall out because there was never a fight to earn further advancement, the men become numbers, statistics of a fight destined for heavy losses. Nick Nolte’s Gordon Tall has something to prove to the younger superiors bossing him around and causing him to kowtow and serve without a voice of his own. Safe at the bottom of the hill fortified with Japanese fighters mowing down anyone who advances north, he can scream and yell all he wants for his men to fall off the cliff with a bullet to the head. When there is no one to stand up against him, that’s the sad inevitability of it all. So, having a Captain such as Elias Koteas’s James ‘Bugger’ Staros willing to protect the warriors he’s begun to hold dear, as sons, despite their own chatter behind his back about him being the cause of Company C’s bad luck, could be the miracle stroke of luck separating an ill-conceived frontal assault and the chance to succeed. In direct opposition to a superior’s order, risking his career for the lives he knows will be lost—on top of the many gone already—he not only gained the respect of his men, the only ones who will ever know exactly what he did for them, but also gave their squad the ability to rise up for victory in the morning.

And this is war—full to the brim with a collection of realists and idealists, fighting for their own reasons, with their own ideas on how to win, mixed together in a volatile powder keg with as much chance to implode as it has to take out the enemy. What exactly is it that they are fighting for? A piece of land to use as a pawn in a game being played offsite by men they have never met? Or are they spilling blood and risking their very existence for the loved ones they left behind, or perhaps the brothers they’ve gained standing on the frontlines to their side for the past two years? What you don’t see in The Thin Red Line, that you would in other war films, is a group of hotshots looking to be heroes, rising to the occasion with adrenaline and machismo to go out in a blaze of glory or grin at the praise lauded upon them at the finish. Every single grunt who takes it upon himself to do the right thing, the moral and brave deeds of sacrifice for one’s fellow man, either dies trying, dies succeeding, or ends up threatening anyone who attempts to bring him up for commendation with a fist to the face. One constant throughout the entire film is a sense of the unknown. Fear is present on each person’s face—tear-streaked in anticipation of the worst and tear-streaked for the fact they survived.

There are suck-up Captains like John Cusack’s John Gaff, crawling around behind Nolte’s Tall, waiting for the opportunity to make his mark. You see a good man like Koteas sit from the sidelines, unable to do anything but watch, while this upstart opportunist takes point of an ambush that would have been impossible without the former’s insubordination. You can’t help but despise him until you realize his true worth. Gaff may stay close to his Lt. Col., but only to earn a voice. His success was never to receive a Silver Star or other accolade, he did it to put himself in a position to ask for water—to speak on behalf of the men relying on his leadership as well as the men he’d be nowhere without. In a very brief story arc, we witness a complete evolution of a character based on preconceptions versus reality. This is what makes the film so brilliant, telling the story of war through the men being ravaged by all they see and do. Throw historical facts out the window and look into the eyes of these men. It is in their souls that the true battle is fought. All that pent up rage mixed with the mystery of whether they’ll ever return home—will it be released upon the enemy or will humanity prevail? Sometimes, unfortunately, these soldiers only realize how much a human life is worth after they’ve taken it away.

Malick has brought to the screen the religion of destruction. Between the voiceover narrations, spanning a large number of characters, speaking pithy statements as gospel; the elegiac imagery of tall grass blowing in the wind, the camera always close to the ground amongst the crouching soldiers moving through; and the words to God, whether by prayer in the case of Koteas or in the ramblings of a lost soul by John Savage’s broken Sgt. McCron, Malick has become an expert at speaking the truth through emotion. When he shows the enemy shaking with the same fear we see etched on the faces of the ‘protagonist’, we discover how similar we all are. By putting a face to the villain, he allows his heroes to show signs of their own evil lurking within. The images of these men screaming, as the world around them falls apart, are not easily forgotten. But neither are the idyllic, colorful memories of Ben Chaplin’s Pvt. Bell and his wife, played by Miranda Otto, shot in soft focus with only voiceover and Hans Zimmer’s profound score as backdrop. These are the close-up, abstract details Bell holds onto in order to brave the fight he was forced into by bureaucratic vengeance. Filmed at odd angles, their framing and color is the only thing separating them from the rest’s gray on green darkness—a nightmarish counterpart of unknown sorrow.

The lush visuals bring a lyrical poeticism to what is shown; turning one battle into a complete existence for a group of men wrapped up into a war that would shape our planet. With static glimpses at the wildlife looking on as its land is blown up and torched to juxtapose with the seemingly domesticated mammals intruding in order to find a foothold against the other, it becomes hard to tell exactly which is more feral. No one gets pacing like Malick and in lesser hands The Thin Red Line would be just another over-bloated work of anti-war propaganda. But that is not what is portrayed here at all. Instead, it is a glimpse into mankind’s capacity for hope and life against a solemnity of bloodlust. I have never seen Nolte as good as he is here, a man so wrapped up in his legacy that an eventual breakdown becomes so much more emphatic; Koteas and Chaplin take their roles and run with the compassion other films would cutout and replace with stern focus and calculated precision; and Caviezel plays Christ before Mel Gibson ever plucked him to star in his own film of sacrificial piety. Pvt. Witt is the complete embodiment of selflessness, using his willingness to help others as his way to find happiness. He proves, time and again, that one man can make a difference. Sacrifice may be a solitary act, but its result sustains the group. Much like Malick and his team, showing that a twenty-year absence only made him better and cinema itself richer.

The Thin Red Line 10/10

http://www.jaredmobarak.com/2010/09/03/the-thin-red-line/

The Thin Red Line is a problem film I would not have wanted to miss. Sequences quickly turn from brilliant to pedestrian and vice-versa. One moment it’s as visceral and involving as any war movie I’ve seen, and in the next, it becomes a laughable parody of that that kind of film.

Let’s start with what’s good. After a 20-year absence Terrence Malick’s ability to capture the beauty and danger of natural vistas remains unsurpassed. Likewise the battle scenes, particularly the extended sequence of the taking of the Guadalcanal hill, have the intensity of the great war movies. In short, what Malick does with his camera is spellbinding. Thematically, it’s also fresh. Unlike that same year’s Saving Private Ryan (which I still prefer), this is not really a World War II film. The idea that war is an affront to nature is not a commentary on any particular war, but a way to look at war itself as an abhorrent deficiency in human nature.

What doesn’t work? If ever a film was hurt by an overabundance of star power, it’s this one. Of the actors who were names at the time, only Nick Nolte gives an actual performance instead of an appearance. John Travolta, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson and George Clooney are all distractions that took me out of the film. Harrelson was a particular problem as his death scene came off as just goofy. There was a lot of over-stylized overacting throughout and dialogue that I can only describe as Lucas-like in its literal obviousness. The apocalyptic narration, which only worked in Days of Heaven due to the quirkiness of the narrator, is here divided among characters and generally undercuts the drama.

Let’s be honest, it isn’t as good as the two masterpiece’s he made before he went crazy and disappeared for twenty some odd years, but very few films are. I judge this particular movie within it’s genre. This is the overall superlative WWII film of the 90’s and 2000’s, with the only flaw I can really pinpoint being the drastic over-scoring by Zimmer. For example, the montage memory sequences are to a certain degree destroyed by overbearingly dramatic music. The visuals are absolutely gorgeous (the use of green is nothing new to the world of “art-films”, but Malick’s touch with it is something particularly special), it is deeply inquisitive towards the nature of war, there is no silly unrealistic plot-line, violence is not exploited as a spectacle, and Vin Diesel isn’t in it. Like much of Malick’s writing, and despite his extensive knowledge of European existentialism of the mid 1900’s, the narrative and dialog is clearly influenced by classic American stylistic realism, and I get a feeling that he was visually influenced at least in part by Japanese cinema (namely the third part of Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition.”) It’s nice to see a bunch of big name actors not talk also, isn’t it? I have high hopes for Malick’s upcoming “Tree of Life” project, and judging by the more or less useless plot descriptions offered on the internet, it seems like a return to normality for his enigmatic, unique style. I really admire him, not only for his films but for his style of thinking and the outlook on life he seemingly possesses. 4 stars.

I just had my third viewing of this film. For me this was the most important viewing, because I’ve now seen two other of Malick’s films.

This is a good film. The scenes taking the ridge are beautifully handled. There’s also a beautiful moment in the early scenes where a soldier is talking to a native woman, asking if she is afraid of him. I could watch that over and over.

The cast is filled with huge names. None of which ever get time to shine. I sort of wonder why they bothered to get them for the film. George Clooney might as well have not been in the film at all. I don’t think this is a problem, I also don’t think it’s an advantage.
Nick Nolte is the stand-out in this film, for me. He plays his character perfectly.

The film doesn’t present a large level of danger, but I don’t believe that’s the point. But what the film did do, was send me into thoughts about life after death etc.

Films seldom send me into such serious thought. So for that, I commend Malick.

forget platoon, forget saving private ryan, forget full metal jacket, forget all war movies, this is the best war movie ever.,
not the typical ‘oscar’ war movie, this is also about life and death, love and betrayal, sacrifices and unpaid sacrifices, solidarity and selfishness, this is like life lesson in just 2 hours and 26 minutes.,

this movie didn’t only provided great battle scene and beautiful cinematography, this movie will also touch your deepest heart, this is gonna make your heart cry out,
this is art, wonderful piece of art, the highest level in movie,
this is one of the greatest cinematic experience you could ever get,
this is beautiful, most beautiful..

Yes Spielberg – do shut up! I love the measured pace of this film – it seems to move along like a musical symphony with images to match; nature carries on around all the carnage; we get caught up in the exhileration of the battle scene to take the hill as if we are playing a videogame, and then during the central lull the suffering of the ‘enemy’ almost comes as a shock and the emotional power is really intense. I would say that this film says a lot about the futility of war. (I was going to say that the animals know better but that’s not really the case)

This is not a “war film” and it is not an “antiwar film.” What Malick (a former philosophy student) has done is use the setting of modern warfare as a way of communicating the essence of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and ethics. Underneath the surface of the observable, individuated phenomena, the essence of the world is will: a non-individuated, passionate yet pointless destructive striving. The will is embodied in Nick Nolte, who lives to fight and win, while recognizing that his way is the way of “nature.” “Look at those vines, Staros, swallowing everything. Nature is cruel.” True insight into the nature of the will, however, leads to compassion for the suffering of others, since we are all One behind appearances, and renunciation of desiring (and its inevitable concomitants, conflict and suffering). The denial of the will is represented by Jim Cavaziel. According to Schopenhauer, if one recognizes the futility of willing but cannot achieve this state of complete ascetic denial, the only other alternative is to mitigate one’s own suffering by keeping one’s expectations as low as possible. This stance is embodied by Sean Penn. From the first, crucial dialogue between Penn and Cavaziel, the agenda of the film is placed before us: given that the world is as it is, should we cling to this world and despair, or should we turn away from it and transcend? As Penn says, “there’s no world but this one.” Cavaziel replies, “I’ve seen another world.” That is what the film is about: a choice between mysticism and nihilism.

The film is not pro-war, because it assumes as Schopenhauer did, that moral justifications of war are always nothing more than rationalizations of a more fundamental need for violence. The film is not anti-war, because unlike all other anti-war films, it does not set up a contrast between a morally praiseworthy form of ordinary life and a morally repugnant form of activity created by and creating war. If war is an expression of the cruelty of nature, or reality itself, moral judgment of it makes no sense—-one might as well condemn the jungle for being jungle. This goes some way toward explaining the peculiar detachment the film aspires to and achieves. The catastrophe the characters are caught up in is the world itself, and the film offers no adequate response to it than to serenely transcend it.

Terrence Malick’s uneven World War II epic could have been a masterpiece if it had lost about an hour. Absolutely beautiful cinematography and stunning visuals highlight some of the most brilliant war sequences ever put on film. Unfortunately, those moments of genius are spaced between long stretches where nothing happens but slow-motion shots of foliage with pretentious voice-over narration. Great performances from an all-star cast, even though a few too many of them had stereotypically dramatic death scenes.