Too beautiful to be totally beautiful

Rating: Null/10 (3 March 1999)

First I must admit that the general beauty of the film really overwhelmed me: beauty of light, colors, subtle details, the emotions in the eyes of the protagonists, beauty of nature, the quietness before the storm of war, the hero, the soldier's wife, the music, the children swimming under water, etc etc...beauty almost everywhere even though death is omnipresent throughout the film. For that reason, the Thin Red Line is definitely worth seeing on a big screen. However, the movie is much too long (about an hour) and repetitive, and the pseudo-philosophy it vehiculates is not very new: I mean, 3 hours to convince you of something you already know (which is that war really is a terrible thing and that men should love each other) is a bit long don't you think? The worst part of the movie certainly has to do with the casting of Box office stars such as Travolta or George Clooney in two useless twenty seconds scenes that totally discredit the movie in terms of realism and credibility. Terrence Malick for sure is a real poet but his movie is too beautiful to be true.