Seems to be brilliant, but does not cross the "red line" of focus.

Rating: Null/10 (5 July 1999)

Every once in a while, there comes a movie that seems to be absolutely brilliant, even amazingly original, and you get kind of ticked off when that brilliance passes you by. Stanley Kubrick's works always seemed to do that for me, along with a few other "artistic" titles that come to mind. It's almost eerie that Kubrick just passed away recently, because "The Thin Red Line" seemed to me to resemble something which Kubrick might have presided over. There are many fascinating sequences and exhilarating spots of cinematography in this new installment of the World War II genre, but a lot of tedious, meandering sequences and a combination of disorganized messages that drift into others, seriously clutter up the story. I could never fully understand what the movie was trying to tell me that was supposed to be the main message of the whole plot. The plot itself passes like a ship on an unpredictable sea, sometimes torrential in its action and suspense but also needlessly dry in other moments. If Terrence Malick's "masterpiece" has one major problem that I can definitely pinpoint, it would probably be its excruciating length. If it ran maybe 45-60 minutes shorter in duration, it might have worked as a tight and alarming picture of war. Instead, it dances around a lot of different meanings and areas of entertainment, from the deeply poetic to the engagingly violent and mysterious. I would like to point out one great performance of the film before I depart. Nick Nolte is one of those actors that takes his time between projects, but always turns out an interesting, if not always likable, character. His work in this entry is just great, a three-dimensional role that receives too little screen time. Call "The Thin Red Line" an epic that is reaching for brilliance and is grasping way too far. Go see "Saving Private Ryan" instead, and get a point and great dramatic strength, something in which "Red Line" falls a tad short. Rating: Two stars and a half.