Still trying to figure it out...

Rating: Null/10 (16 January 1999)

It's frustrating coming out of a movie thinking "Well, that SEEMED deep, but I must have missed most of it." That's how I felt coming out of The Thin Red Line.
There are some definite positive as well as negative points: as many have pointed out, it was a beautifully shot movie, with incredible vibrant color, and striking imagery. Every frame was worth a photographic still. But there are some serious technical flaws as well. Given the number of characters that appear it is simple impossible to keep them apart -- I found I could not even remember any names as I walked out of the theater. There is certainly no cohesive narrative, and no climax that I can ascertain.
But then, perhaps I am wrong to insist on such details. Many of the reviewers here have called this movie "poetry", and I would agree wholeheartedly. It is poetry in that it gives you a series of images, moods, colors and then tells you to piece them up yourself. Just as in written poetry where word connotation and atmosphere are often more important than message, so Mallick's vocabulary is light and color and mumbled dialogue.
I would be wary then, of any attempts to impose a "meaning" or a "point" to this movie. I don't know what this movie is about, but I know what it is NOT about:
-- It is not about the man/nature relationship, although frequent man/nature imagery recurs. Yet I find this imagery ambiguous, and at times contradictory. The opening sequence with the soldier living among the natives seems to forward "harmony with nature" message, while subsequent images refer to nature as inherently violent and cruel. So who's in harmony with nature, us or the natives?
-- It is NOT a "the enemy is just like us" message. Little attempt was made to humanize this adversary. A few scenes showed some Japanese soldiers crying and wringing their hair in utter despair, while others prayed feverishly -- while these suggest human emotion and human weakness, they don't speak as mush as it would if one of them -- indeed if anyone in this movie -- just cracked a smile, or showed some other emotional state besides hysteria. This theme gets a total of perhaps 3 minutes of screen time.
-- It is DEFINITELY not about the realities of war. One review on this site which I greatly enjoyed pointed numerous military/factual errors. Aside from these, the behaviour displayed by most of these characters is HIGHLY questionable. "Saving Private Ryan" went to extraordinary lengths to place the audience on Omaha beach, using a great deal of eye-level shots in a kind of first-person perspective. The point of view of TTRL is ultimately detatched. Besides which if Mallick were to be trusted, then the entire US army consists entirely of philosophers from the South, with one or two guys from Brooklyn thrown in.
In the end the themes of this movie are just as fleeting as the characterization -- great introduction but gone before we could get to know them. This in the end is one of the greatest problems of the movie, and probably is what makes the 2.5 hours seem like 2.5 weeks. By the end, it seems like Mallick isn't even into it anymore. At the beginning of the movie, the voice-over dialogue is mysterious and intriguing. Two hours later, lines like "What is love?" and "Where does evil come from?" sound like philosophy for 9 year olds. And, unfortunately, shooting light streaming through trees, or birds perching on branches DON'T necessarily make it deep philosophical material.
Nevertheless, as can be seen from the viewer comments, one either loves this movie or despises it. If you're considering seeing it, just consider that you might fall into the former category. As I say above, I'm still trying to figure out where I stand.