1/3 Great Movie, 1/3 National Geographic, 1/3 Butchering

Rating: 3/10 (12 January 1999)

If you are going to make a film based on the novel, "The Thin Red Line," you should at least make it resemble to book. Malick had too much time to change every detail of the amazing novel into a jumbled mess of a screenplay.
The scenes that are straight from the book are some of the best scenes ever filmed (i.e., the assault on the Japanese bunker, the Sgt. Keck death scene, the destruction of Boola Boola village). Where Malick fails is in his overly drawn-out approach to the men of C-for-Charlie company crossing the thin red line.
Although the scenery is beautiful, there is far too much of it. Instead of including more sections of the book and filming the development of the characters, Malick only gives us a glimpse of the men of C Company, unlike the book, where the histories and, most importantly, the motivations of characters are well developed. Although I realize that the film would have been 6 hours if the book was filmed cover to cover, Malick ignores or changes key points of the book and instead films exotic birds, or a "happy native village." And apparently, Malick ran out of film, because he did not bother to include the end of the book, an injustice on the scale of Kubrick's (accidental) exclusion of the real ending of "A Clockwork Orange."
Malick changes characters, and in doing so changes what made the book so good. Perhaps if I did not expect to see "The Thin Red Line," I wouldn't be so hard on it, but I expected to see "The Thin Red Line." When you do see it as James Jones envisioned it, it is a classic nearly equal to "Saving Private Ryan." When Malick takes over and interjects his perspective, the film turns into a chaotic mess.
3/10