One of the Best War Movies ever - true masterpiece of cinema

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2011)

The Thin Red Line is a true masterpiece of cinema. When I watched it in theaters in 1998 I absolutely fell in love with it. I recently purchased the Criterion Blu ray release and realized that after 13 years, I am still very much in love with this movie.
The Thin Red Line is not a typical war movie. It is not driven by action alone. It explores the duality of nature and draws parallelism between the struggle within nature and the struggle within each man. It achieves this through poetic cinematography, philosophical narration voice-overs, great battle scenes and great casting from the best actors in the business.
The duality of nature is presented from the opening shot. A crocodile leaves the shore and moves into the water. The setting is a beautiful island. There is something about watching the most horrible event in all humanity, war, within a setting so beautiful, it touches your soul. Where the nature lives in harmony, soldiers are fighting a war. This duality continues all throughout the movie and never ceases to amaze. One of my favorite scenes is when the soldiers are walking through the grass, an aboriginal Indian is walking the other way, and when they are in the same frame, soldiers look like the alien element and the Indian seems to perfectly mesh with nature.
The other unique aspect of The Thin Red Line is that it gives us the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. Often, people put up a facade and keep their feelings inside. This is another duality the film presents through voice-overs. Soldiers do not always think about winning. They are human beings and they often dream about being home, going home, and they fear. In that regard, the movie is very realistic.
The Thin Red Line also explores the morality in times of war, and the difficulty of making the right decision under extra-ordinary circumstances where the given objective (a military order) could compromise the sacredness of human life. This struggle is presented through the conflicts of colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) with captain James Staros (Elias Koteas) and sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) with private Witt (Jim Caviezel).
One indisputable fact is cinematography of the film is absolutely fantastic. The trees, the water, the hills, birds, all the colors of the island come alive (even more so on the Blu ray). The casting is one of the greatest ones you will witness. Two-times academy winner Sean Penn is here, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, James Caviezel, John Travolta and George Clooney make brief appearances as well (also academy award winner Adrien Brody has brief appearance and John C. Reiley and Jared Leto)