War is bad...yeah, we get the message.

Rating: 1/10 (6 April 2004)

It is the curious notion that seemingly every director who undertakes making a war film, not only feels the need to state the obvious -- that war is bad -- but must also try to make it seem as though it is his original insight. This shallow, condescending attitude is but a minor flaw in the long-winded, chaotic jumble that Terrence Malick has served up in THE THIN RED LINE.
I am more than willing to assume that Malick had the best of intentions, but that is little consolation for the incoherent mess that is the result. Reportedly chopped down from an original running time of 6 hours, the resulting three-hour marathon of simplistic ideas and pretentious metaphors adds up to little of any consequence and doesn't even offer a compelling narrative to justify the effort.
Like a latter day AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, Malick has assembled a notable cast of big name stars, whose only function apparently was to help generate financing for the spectacle. Plus, Malick's reputation is such that major stars are eager to work for him, just for the bragging rights for having done so. Yet, here they are given little to do within the film other than to contribute insignificant cameos. But then again it is hard to see where anybody in the film is there for any reason other than to be a cameo. No one character is given any real identity, let alone material to play.
The vague, almost generic, storyline is divorced from any sense of the political realities of war, just as the characters are reduced to playing one-note versions of one war archetype or another. The narrative jumps from phoney-baloney "poetic" moments to poorly staged battle scenes with little continuity or flow. Dream sequences or flashbacks or whatever they are supposed to be are littered throughout with little regard as to who they refer or their relevance to the story. The film is an editorial mess. This is just plain bad film-making. Period.
Pretentious monologues and pretty shots of nature cannot hide the bumbling incompetence that is the sum total of this failure. All the desperate rationalizations about it being a poetic statement can't overshadow the numbing banality of its vision.
THE THIN RED LINE is a big bloody bore.