Reseñas de la crítica

The Thin Red Line is a sensuous experience: it deserves 35mm Panavision on a huge screen. (Does that mean it can hardly be known again?) But there's something else contradictory in the ending. Malick exults in the island being above the conflict in the natural world that will persist after our fuss ends. That closeness to insignificance is touching. But then one has to realise that the cinematography is 'magnificent', that these men are star faces, that Malick's very reticence is 'artistic'.

The blurring of the boundary between self and other can give rise to the solace that ‘life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes in appearance, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.' (25) Our lives and deaths may be impersonally swallowed in the current, yet we are fleetingly a part of the continuity of life. In The Thin Red Line this is reflected via evocative and spiritualised notions of ‘all things shining' and ‘the glory' of existence.

Marking an end to Terrence Malick's twenty plus years of hibernation, THE THIN RED LINE is less a war film than a full-fledged existential inquiry into, well, everything. It's the kind of film that one could build an entire PHIL 101 curriculum around, grappling with essential questions about divine providence, the soul, the value of a single human life, and the origins of good vs. evil.

One of the great pleasures in Terrence Malick's cinema, in particular his last two films, is his willingness to layer meaning through a variety of aesthetic effects. Despite the facts that all of his films are shot in natural light on location, all are interested in physical labor of some kind, and all spend a good chunk of time looking at the world, there's never the sense that the physicality of any shot can be ascribed to any one register of meaning.

Through image, sound, and words, Malick's third feature (his first in 20 years after the groundbreaking one-two punch of 1973's Badlands and 1978's Days of Heaven) fuses a complex spiritual inquiry to its narrative arc, the resulting thematic/dramatic path among the most fully realized philosophical contributions yet afforded by the cinema.

The result is a masterpiece—a Malick masterpiece, telling a powerfully written, superbly acted story that casts new light on his characteristic themes of nature and culture, thought and language, humanity and inhumanity, paradise lost and tran¬scen¬¬dence found.

The Thin Red Line takes to heart its opening mention of a "war in the heart of nature," by which Malick means both the natural world and the nature of man. "Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind?" Caviezel's Pvt. Witt wonders. The movie takes shape as a rich network of opposing forces: fear of death and awe for life, the heady abstraction of its ideas and the near-hallucinatory clarity of its sounds and images.

The film, emptied of traditional screenplay clockwork, fills itself up with an elegiac, epiphanic sympathy that makes it feel closer in spirit to a Philip Glass opera or Vaughan Williams cantata or even a Kazantzakis epic. After nearly three hours of this gentle scouring, even the unwilling viewer emerges burned by the film's rocket of heartbreak.

The first thing that gets to me is the silence. Everything struck by silence, enveloped by it, absorbed in it. This silence expresses a force greater than any of the explosions to ensue – soon we will see this directly, in the startling tranquillity that instantly covers everything in sight just after the first two scouts are shot dead. Even before the first shots ring out, silence fills the entire screen and my body with the stilled violence of anticipation.

If you agree with me that 90 percent of the movies made nowadays are insufficiently ambitious, being overly ambitious is a shared flaw that deserves our deepest respect. Both filmmakers [Malick and Rob Tregenza] value physical environment as much as "action" in the ordinary sense, and both — albeit in very different ways — use the cleavage and disruptions produced by World War II to reflect on the second half of the 20th century.

It is an extraordinary achievement to have made a big-budget war film which seems so utterly personal. For all the dissonant voices, the star cameos, the awesome cinematography, this is Malick's vision alone. The island setting only reinforces the sense that he is a Prospero pulling all the strings.

Here is a visceral reminder of all that made his past work so hauntingly majestic, even if this movie's difficulties will soon announce themselves with equal clarity. Intermittently brilliant as it is, ''The Thin Red Line'' shows why being a great film director and directing a great film are not the same.