It's not "that other war movie of 1998"

Rating: 8/10 (29 June 2017)

"The Thin Red Line," being released so close to "Saving Private Ryan", is destined to be called "that other war movie of 1998."
This is very unfortunate and definitely very wrong.
For, "The Thin Red Line" is not just another brutal war movie. It is a visual and thematic masterpiece. In any other year, this would've probably been the highlight, rather than being dubbed as an imitation of Spielberg's war-epic.
For sure, "The Thin Red Line" is not as disturbing to watch as "Saving Private Ryan" is. Even though, this film capture the war- genre more accurately. It is a complete fiction, (so is Saving Private Ryan) but at least this one is more true to the horrors of warfare.
Though not as nearly as graphic, the directing seems to produce a very suspenseful and uncomfortable connection to the battles at hand. Thus, be warned that parts of this movie can be very hard to watch, and are certainly not for everyone. The violence at least is not an end in itself, and serves to illustrate the sacrifice and madness young men endured in WWII to fight for our freedom. In these respects, "The Thin Red Line" is similar to "Saving Private Ryan". One might well ask why watch two such gruesome features in one year?
The actors in "The Thin Red Line" are making one movie, and the director is making another. This leads to an almost hallucinatory sense of displacement, as the actors struggle for realism, and the movie's point of view hovers above them like a high school kid all filled with big questions. My guess is that any veteran of the actual battle of Guadalcanal would describe this movie with an eight-letter word much beloved in the Army.
The bigger problem which will come to mind when people seen it in recent years: the voice-overs of the characters' thoughts.
The problem is that not one of these voice-overs is realistic in the least. They all seem to be written by the same poet or philosopher who has never actually been to war, but has seen a couple good war movies and read a few war novels. He is thinking in the style of "The Grand Poetry of War," which is sharply at odds with everything that is happening on screen. Their thoughts are not real, nor do they seem to be real; they are obvious fabrications meant to manipulate us into thinking of war in romantic terms. The language is beautiful, and the metaphors accurately describe the horrors of war. But unless the company shown in the movie is made up completely of Yale English professors, the voice-overs feel far removed from the individual thinking the thoughts. On the other hand, the Japanese throughout are totally depersonalised (in crucial scenes, their language is not even translated with subtitles); seen as enemies so much as necessary antagonists--an expression of nature's compulsion to "contend with itself."
Sidebar: "Saving Private Ryan" wins in terms of scary scenes, but nothing like the constant terror seen in the eyes of Malick's actors. And they all manage to do this with a relatively small amount of screen-time.