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THE THIN RED LINE Send This Review to a Friend
Director Terrence Malick's first film in 20 years is a different kind of war movie from "Saving Private Ryan," which stressed realism. "The Thin Red Line," based on the James Jones novel about World War II, blends realism with an attempt to wax poetic. Sometimes gripping, sometimes pretentious, it is relentlessly contemplative in tone, contrasting the brutality of war with nature, memories of home and the urge to survive.
Malick relies on voice-over narration as he did in "Days of Heaven," this time in the form of GI reflections on battle and the peacetime past as depicted in dreamlike flashbacks. The bloody, costly action at the core involves American soldiers trying to take a key but heavily fortified hill from the Japanese on Guadalcanal.
The male mix includes the bold, the frightened and the rebellious, all ruthlessly driven by a gung-ho officer who callously views casualties as a necessity to both winning the war and enhancing his own military accomplishments. Nick Nolte is so hysterically over the top in the part that he strains credulity. But the rest of the acting by a cast that includes Sean Penn, Elias Koteas, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, George Clooney and John C. Reilly is generally convincing as the soldiers experience hell in the midst of natural beauty.
The film is a haunting if excessively arty experience and despite its sometimes irritating ponderousness it is obviously thoughtful, sincere and philosophically anti-war. A 20th Century-Fox release.
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