The Squirmometer hits 10

Rating: 1/10 (1 September 2015)

How NOT to do it. The Thin Red Line. Quite simply one of the worst war films I've ever seen. Nick Nolte overacting and bellowing all the time, Sean Penn, John Cusack, George Clooney, John Travolta for Chrissake and all the rest. I'd read very good reviews of this but it did all the wrong things. First, the intensely irritating quasi-philosophical monologues throughout the film like "Why do we do this to ourselves? Where does this hatred come from?", the endless shots of the sun through the ferns and the whispering grass, the horrible flashbacks to his girlfriend who dumps him in a letter - yawn - the hero that that gets killed, next shot is him swimming underwater with loads of kids, the dreadful men-dying-in-each-others'-arms scenes... mummy! Dire. Hollywood does it again. The thing about a good war movie is that it can be hours long like Das Boot or A Bridge Too Far and it still seems like no time has passed at all, crap like this you suffer every minute of its self-indulgent preachy saccharine 179 minutes. I was reduced near the end to fast forwarding in the hope of more battle scenes. Chronic.