Ghastly, pretentious mess of a film.

Rating: Null/10 (22 February 2003)

First of all, I don't think 'The Thin Red Line' was a rip-off of 'Saving Private Ryan'. That's an infuriatingly stupid attitude to take towards the two films. Working on that basis 'Platoon' must be a rip-off of 'Apocalypse Now' since they are both set in the Vietnam War. 'Private Ryan' is also terrible, but that's largely due to the fact that Spielberg produced a slickly directed peice of jingoistic, sentimental art-as-propeganda (William Goldman dismissed it as 'an execrable piece of sh*t', and I heartily agree). But 'The Thin Red Line' plumbs new depths by actually appearing to be something of artistic quality. Terence Malik is a fine director, 'Badlands' and 'Days of Heaven' are both excellent films, but TTRL is nothing short of disastrous. It sprawls. It doesn't cohere. It looks beautiful but has nothing so say other than the usual trite and hackneyed mesages about mans inhumanity to man and the human condition. There are far too many characters, so we aren't actually given the opportunity to see any of them develop satisactorily. Perhaps Malik wanted to show how hundreds of little stories were being played out, with the war itself merely a huge framing device. On the other hand a more cynical, and accurate, perspective would be that lots of extraneous parts were written for the huge number of A-list actors who wanted to attach their name to such a project.
The film is also too long. There's nothing wrong with a 3 hour plus running time if the narrative can sustain it. But about 10 times during the last hour the music swells, the camera pulls up into the sky and the screen fades. On each occasion I was halfway out of my chair before it cut back to another boot camp sequence. This was because I genuinely felt the film had ended. Had there been conflict I felt was unresolved, or a plot that hadn't satisfactorily ended I would have stayed seated awaiting it's conclusion. But since the film is essentially one big non-event with no perceptible story or point it could have ended anywhere with no bother. Someone really needed to sort out the editing, and leave a lot of the self-effacing cameos on the floor.
Needless to say the critics loved it. 'An overlong, superficially meaningful war movie by a reclusive director coasting on past glories, with a huge cast and aspirations to making some kind of meaningful statement? I'm There!'. It's also the kind of film you can't just come out and say you hated. The usual response is 'Oh you just didn't understand it.' Oh, but I did. I understood it only too well.