3 hours of mundane, pretentious *stuff*

Rating: 1/10 (8 January 1999)

You know there is one main difference between Terrence Malick's version of ww2 and Spielberg's. The differnce is that Spielberg's was good and Malick's is the total opposite. Private Ryan was also entertaining as well as thought provoking while The thin red line just wanders aimlessly through a Thoreau defined world. I must say that any film that blatantly asks "what is love?" is in my book pretentious. The film also looks like a national geographic special on the animals of Guadalcanal except that National geographic specials are more fun to watch. The inclusion of all the different movie stars just turned the film into one big distraction with a "where's waldo?" effect with the audience going George Clooney's in this movie? Travolta? Cusack? look, it's Jared Leto! and did anybody else think this was just a big Calvin Klein commercial where everyone was whispering in overhead narrative. I could have sworn I heard Ben Chaplin whisper "Eternity, by Calvin Klein, available wherever immortality is sold". I have to admit I walked out of Private Ryan, but that is because the images were so hyperkinetic and induced such great feelings in me, i needed to breathe. I had to walk out of thin red line too but that's cause it sucked. Terence Malick I hear is a legend but I don't think he should have come out of retirement to stuff this pretentious piece of "art" down our throats (much like I was disappointed with Ronin by Frankenheimer. I don't know why I listened to all these film critics who put this thing on their top ten lists but I warn you not to see this film and if you do see it please tell me I am not the only one who sees it as a bad film. Oh there is one redeeming part of the movie. the part where the bird is crawling and slowly dying, I thought that image was very poignant, But at the same time I thought "what kind of sicko director would purposely injure a bird to make a movie????