A book or A Movie?

Rating: 6/10 (15 March 2000)

I think thin red line is not a good movie but might be a good book. A movie should mainly use the actor(actress)'s body language including the action, the countenance and so on to express the main idea. This movie didn't make good use of the body language. Instead, there were long long monologues of what the soldier thought about the war, lots of suspicion in mind.
I think it was poorly directed and the script was terrible. I wonder what on earth the director wanted to do by the combination of the fighting scene and the peaceful scene. Only to let us see how bad the war was and how peaceful life they could have enjoyed?
I have watched it twice and I just couldn't get the whole story line. There were too many similar characters. I mean these guys looks so similar that I couldn't even tell who is who. And I think the story itself is not attractive.
Obviously, it is an anti-war film. However the director didn't do well enough to make you feel the horror of the war. Compared to the bloody, horrible and touching 20 mins scene of the landing in Saving Private Ryan, scenes in Thin Red Line are simply not touching enough. At least, Spielberg's twenty-minute-scene really gave me a feeling that I had been right there. It told me how cruel the war could be.