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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: 20th Century Fox
Salesrank: 47198
Released: May 21, 2002 |
| Our Price: $5.89 |
| Used Price: $0.20 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A powerful frontline cast - including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson and George Clooney - explodes into action in this hauntingly realistic view of military and moral chaos in the Pacific during World War II.
Description of The Thin Red Line - DTS:
One of the cinema's great disappearing acts came to a close with the release of The Thin Red Line in late 1998. Terrence Malick, the cryptic recluse who withdrew from Hollywood visibility after the release of his visually enthralling masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978), returned to the director's chair after a 20-year coffee break. Malick's comeback vehicle is a fascinating choice: a wide-ranging adaptation of a World War II novel (filmed once before, in 1964) by James Jones. The battle for Guadalcanal Island gives Malick an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure philosophical noodling--or simply let the camera contemplate the first steps of a newly birthed tropical bird, the sinister skulk of a crocodile. This is not especially an actors' movie--some faces go by so quickly they barely register--but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private (newcomer Jim Caviezel). The picture's sprawl may be a result of Malick's method of "finding" a film during shooting and editing, and in some ways The Thin Red Line seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete. Yet it casts a spell like almost nothing else of its time, and Malick's visionary images are a challenge and a signpost to the rest of his filmmaking generation. --Robert Horton
The Thin Red Line - DTS Reviews:
Stink, stank, stunk 
2009-01-01 - The thing that made "The Thin Red Line" a flawed war movie for me was the way some of the characters were cast and/or filmed in a way that made them undistinguishable from each other. They were supposed to be guys you could follow, but looked so similar they became a few more faces in the crowd with extra camera time.
Next, the thing they did that STUNK it up for me is...
* * * * SPOILER to follow * * * *
...the way they showed the American soldiers brutalizing the Japanese, namely the most vulnerable ones. Pulling teeth from the wounded and killing the nonthreatening guys (the Japanese soldiers surrendering or in the act of praying on their knees).
We got to see the praying guys get shot and bayonetted more than once in this film, sometimes in slow motion from the first person point of view. In TTRL's later segments, the way our guys were cutting the enemy down when there was no fight in them was hardly cathartic in the way that, say, "We Were Soldiers" went when we took the attack to the enemy. But in this film, the enemy became so passive in the wake of our regular sadistic brutality that toward the end you almost wanted to see our guys get popped. I don't mind a "War is hell" theme, but not mixed with a "boo for our side."
A beautiful film 
2008-12-18 - This film in my opinion is an epic combination of sight, sound, and performance. Nick Nolte's role was Oscar worthy. It is the most powerful, gutteral, desperate, portrayal of a combat commander ever filmed. There is no fluff, no contrived dialogue, only a soldier pushing for the victory that has eluded him his entire life, his generation's life. Koteas as Cpt. Starles is excellent, as are Caviezel, Cusack, Chaplin, and Penn. The philosophical meanderings and voice over take quite a bit of flack. I think one needs to be reminded that these are not fully formed men we're observing. These are 18 year old boys standing on the brink of savagery, murder, and anihilation. When they have time to ponder their situation, how would you expect them to think, how deep and meaningful is the philosophy of an 18 year old? These boys that have been thrown into the meat grinder are dealing with the horror that is confronting them, and posessing them, the best that they can. They get drunk, foul themselves, cry, run away, attack, and sometimes converse with the only others who can possibly relate. The cogs in this war machine are individuals, each carrying their own baggage, wounds, sucesses, and failures. Expose them to combat and these things either melt away and reform, or they galvanize and remain in state. That is what the film is about to me.
Crossing the Line 
2008-11-16 - Malik's epic anti-war treatise is less effective on repeat and its pitch at the sublime is best savoured on big-screen theatre darkness to work its magic. Much of the necessary swatches of sky through tree canopy, macro nature, and shifting light over sussurating grasses, the epiphanies experienced from the Christ-like Caviezel used to counter the violence of combat terror, is lost on small format. Initially, the film moved me. Now, and with the pretentious,'New World', added to Malik's oeuvre, I side with those who experience tedium, while holding that it is an incomparably better film. The lack of character development is essential to the director's overview; their parts clearly serve the director's philosophy. Yet there are stunning cameo roles from Nolte, Penn, and Cavizel. It is one of the few war films that delve into the individual fear and deaths of the combatants. But there's too much repetition, even given that...flashbacks to the young bride, Penn's pessimistic utterances, the musings of the Jim Caviezel character which verge on a parody of Tarkovskian metaphysical doubt. He alone seems bent on a spiritual quest to redeem the self midst the atrocities, and a theosophic strain leaks through his pronouncements. His self-sacrifice is inevitable. A half-hour edit would profit the audience, and I would nominate this final section. But who could seriously quibble with an American director pitching at the transcendental, a glimpse of a better and redemptive world than the one thrust upon the terrorised youth depicted. Malick, bravely, went for the big picture in this one and must have felt to the far side of his culture in the act of doing so.
So listlessly boring, I remember almost nothing
2008-10-27 - I saw this movie in theaters when it first came out. I was a child, then, 10 or 11 years old. Maybe I should have been set up to be bored, but even looking back on it now, ten years later, I find myself justified in claiming it boring.
Even as a child, I wasn't the sort easily bored by adult-type movies. I could sit through a movie like "Courage Under Fire" and be entertained. This one, however, had about two scenes of action, and the rest just people lounging around talking to themselves.
First they try a D-Day style mock-up beach landing, only there's no one firing at them from the beach, so that ends up looking awkward, whether or not it happened in real life. Then comes a charge up a hill, where there is ACTION~! Then the soldiers make it into a village, where the spend the remaining 1.5-2 hours living among the people, talking to themselves, thinking about stuff, and doing pretty much absolutely nothing, either physically or mentally, with no content left to excite World War II studiers either in the form of action, strategy, or insight.
What you get instead is these characters, most of which are given no time or chance to develop into more than caricatures of generic emotions or archetypes, rambling about their lives with random images and hammy philosophy.
At the end, the Japanese attack the village and all the soldiers run or die. And I'm left wondering exactly why the film even existed.
And then I remember this is the same director who made "The New World", another movie with half a page of plot, and thirty pages of people frolicking about to cinematography and pretentious attempts at being an "art film", so that anyone who comes out of the film not liking it can simply be scoffed at with the typical "You just don't get it. Typical stupid American needing your car chases and shoot-outs to be entertained" manifesto.
Well I'm not a stupid American who needs car chases and shoot-outs to be entertained. I shed real tears of emotion at Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood". I gape in amazement at the drama of such movies as "Twelve Angry Men" and "Midnight Cowboy", laugh at movies ranging from "The Big Lebowski" and "Annie Hall" to "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters", and even get thrills from action movies like "Casino Royale" or "Munich".
This film has no categorization; it is a run-on sentence of a movie. It is powerfully empty nothingness, just film on a reel and nothing of substance.
"Thin Red Line" or "Thin Plot Line"
2008-10-17 - I am shocked by the number of glowing reviews this movie received - I saw it on opening day in a theater crowded with active duty military troops (I am a retired vet), and most got up and walked out by the half-way point! And I wish I had walked out too! Having 14 months+ in Iraq, I do not see that our troops would feel much differently about this movie today than they did back in 1999. My feelings are not based on the fact that the movie is "anti-war" - the more accurately a war movie portrays combat, the less likely it is you want to go out and advocate violence. The problem is that The Thin Red Line is very poorly executed depiction of infantry combat and does not provide either compelling characters or credible story that makes you care.
The Thin Red Line is set during one of the most pivotal battles in the Pacific, but there is non of the sense of desperation in the movie. Plot development? What plot? Character development? None of that either. Dialog? Acting? Wooden and melodramatic. The cinematography is gorgeous, but does not save the movie. How many flashbacks to a the same coconut on a beach can a man tolerate? All in all, I was absolutely bored.
If you are interested in a good war movie set in the WWII Pacific Theater of Operations I suggest The Great Raid based on actual events and adapted from William B. Breuer's book about the 1945 liberation of the Cabanatuan Prison Camp on the Philippine island of Luzon. But I suspect that many of those who have given The Thin Red Line a thumbs up would balk at the The Great Raid which in addition to being anti-war, also demonstrates why you sometimes have to fight with its opening a scene of the Japanese massacre of prisoners of war on Palawan.
