Over Shadowed By Another WWII Movie

Rating: 10/10 (24 February 2017)

There are already so many great reviews of the Thin Red Line here, I am not going to write another routine review. Instead, I am going to write about the events that led up to this movie and why it is often over-looked and under-rated in reviews. The movie was made by Terrence Malick, without question one of the best directors in the history of Hollywood. He came on the Hollywood scene quickly. His very first movie was a brilliant success. It takes most other great Hollywood directors three and sometimes four films before a masterpiece is created. But sadly, his background was not the "right one" for such amazing talent in Hollywood, so he was quickly undermined by the establishment there. After his first masterpiece, he followed with another masterpiece movie and his talent began to be realized as "miles ahead" of the then (mid-1970s) established directors such as Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Lucas, Woody Allen, Altman, Polansky, Friedkin etc. Not only was Malick the brilliant director he was also a Harvard scholar, a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, a brilliant philosophy scholar and a professor at MIT. Again, he is light years ahead of any Hollywood director to be compared to except possibly Kubrick and Hitchcock.
Following Malick's second film, many strange events took place that eventually drove Malick to move to and live in France. The first took place after Malick finished Days of Heaven. Paramount offered him complete creative freedom on his next project named Q, but immediately began to rescind this freedom. At this time Hollywood had discovered that, like Steve Jobs, he had a Syrian heritage. It all went down hill from there. After his second movie (Thin Red Line is his third) he proposed working on a movie adaptation of The Boom Boom Room. His Hollywood production turned it down and instead pushed The Elephant Man on him. He worked on this movie for an extended time period and then it was revealed that another director had also been given a screenplay and was finishing ahead of Malick's time-line, which force Malick to cancel the movie.
He was then working on his new masterpiece called Q when Paramount abruptly began to pull his creative freedom away causing the film to be shelved after another extended period of working on it. He finally abandoned Hollywood and began doing French projects with Louis Malle involving screen writing. He began working on a French inspired New Orleans film The Moviegoer, but hurricane Katrina hit the area in mid production and halted the film. Malick was given another film, the biography of Jerry Lee Lewis and again, after much work, it was discovered that another director had been given a screenplay and was due to finish before Malick's projected time-line forcing him again to cancel it. A final film project was given Malick (The English Speaker) and yet again another director was leaked a concurrent screenplay which became A Dangerous Method.
So indeed, Hollywood went out of its way to make sure Malick was kept away from the screen, as jealously went berserk. He was indeed a threat to the current Hollywood tribe. Malick finally ignored Hollywood and just created this movie The Thin Red Line with own his own budget, staff and resources. But it proved impossible to keep secret. Word got out of his WWII story-line and Spielberg began to immediately copy the movie as best he could without actually reading the screen play. Because Malick had been off the screen for so long, Spielberg's movie received higher billing and better marketing support. The two movies were released simultaneously in the box office. But after seeing both, one can see that Malick's is the brilliant masterpiece. Thin Red Line portrays war in a very realistic, harsh, destructive sense, where Saving Prvt Ryan gives a nationalist, patriotic recruitment effort. Malick interweaves scenes of nature, beauty and innocents against the war backdrop where Spielberg interweaves hatred, psychological aggression and blind faith in US led warring. Malick's troops question the feeble US military story-line and eventually discover that on the other side are just young scared men like themselves. This movie has become even more important in light of the US destruction of Malick's homeland of Syria. I would like to see Malick do his next movie about the great Assyrian Empire and particularly focused on King Sargon II on his conquest of King Hoshea. It would bring our knowledge of history into a very new light.