Wings of Private Ryan

Rating: Null/10 (20 February 1999)

The Thin Red Line represents Terrence Malick's return to movie making after a twenty year hiatus. For his subject he chose James Jones autobiographical novel telling the story of a platoon of army grunts during WWII, sent into Guadalcanal just after the Marine invasion, to clean up the remnants of Japanese resistance from that island. Little did they know that this clean up operation would last more than six months and take the lives of many.
IMHO, the best part of this movie are the looks. Visually, this movie is stunning. The cinematography really shows us a paradise on earth, one which we know and fear will soon be despoiled by war. The story line can best be described as a long, sometimes rambling philosophical discussion on war, men, and their internal conflicts as they are asked to kill or be killed, sometimes in the most seemingly senseless way. Most of the movie contains voice over narrations of the characters thoughts. In this the movie resembles closely Wim Wenders classic art-house flick "Wings of Desire", where the angels in the movie can hear the humans' thoughts (this film was very poorly remade as "City of Love" last year; do yourself a favor and rent the original). TRL uses the same narrative technique, except the characters (and there are quite a number of them) are even less clearly defined, thereby giving us the sense that these soldiers are nameless and faceless, just more cannon fodder attempting to stay sane in an incredibly insane situation. Before the second reel, several of them have already lost their sanity, and it is questionable whether the more-or-less lead character himself is sane.
Many people have commented that this is not a war movie, which is partially true. Comparisons to the other recent war flick, "Private Ryan", are also inevitable. To be fair, the battle scenes in this movie, though not very extensive, are among the best ever filmed, the equal or perhaps superior to the famous "Private Ryan" scenes. But the narrative is different. This movie is more of an artsy movie, albeit an artsy war movie.
Great performances by Nick Nolte as the aging coronel who wants as much glory as he can muster from his one and only big war. Although the pic is chock full of some of the best male actors in the businees (Sean Penn, John Cusack, Ben Chaplin, Jon Savage), their roles are not really juicy enough to warrant a lot of attention. For exmaple George Clooney appears in the movie for one scene, and John Travolta for a scene and half; it's hard to give either a good or a very bad performance in 20 seconds.
From what I understand, Malick actually shot something like 100 hours worth of footage, which he had to pare down to only 3. I'm curious whether some of the footage left on the cutting room floor would've fleshed out the characters or focused the film better. As it is, it's difficult to ask anyone to sit through three hours of ruminations.