Pure Brilliance. Better Than Saving Private Ryan In Some Light. But Not For Everyone.

Rating: 10/10 (7 March 2015)

There are two kinds of movies that are not for everyone. There's movies with disturbing content and brutality that will make the viewer uneasy. Saving Private Ryan is a good example of that. Then there's extremely complex movies that require full attention and lots of analyzing in order to comprehend. The Thin Red Line is an excellent example of that. Overly complex movies are often well liked, but Red Line caught a bad rap since it came out at the wrong time.
The Thin Red Line is overshadowed by Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, Saving Private Ryan. Both Private Ryan and Red Line are phenomenal works, but in different perspectives. I actually prefer this to Private Ryan, (ever so slightly more) as it is a thinking man's movie. But my opinion may change. I would actually call this my second favourite war movie ever (behind Apocalypse Now). Spielberg's directing of Saving Private Ryan is nothing short of majestic. He makes the battles look like first person points of view and makes the viewer feel like they are in it themselves. The horrors of war are shown very well, but the general story is absurd and the emotional factor is clichÃ©d. Red Line's battles are inferior to Private Ryan's, but the emotional factor and many other plot and filming devices surpass Private Ryan's.
The Thin Red Line provides different narrations to gives an inside look at these soldiers. That is a brilliant move. They are forced to go to war and must face the horrors. Private Ryan is by far the scariest war film ever, but it is patriotic. Red Line goes back to basics and uses the same formula as Apocalypse Now and Platoon do: how war can change people. But Red Line distinguishes itself from those by using more symbolism and philosophy. Jim Caviezel is our main character who is AWOL living in a peaceful Indian village who is taken by Sean Penn to partake in the Battle of Guadalcanal. There is a scene later on in the film where he is back with the tribe and there is tension among everyone. I never understood if the whole experience with the tribe was a hallucination or not, but they do symbolize the negativity that the world has. The battle starts with them getting up a hill battling the Japanese. The higher they get on the hill, the worse everything gets for them. While this movie is going on, there's lots of lovely shots of nature. Nature provides a relationship to the soldiers, both comparing and contrasting. There's nice imaging of the nature-filled areas and the nice sunlight, and there's a crocodile that enters a pond (pretty much a threshold) then we see just its head later on.
This is one of the most philosophical movies ever that can easily be misunderstood. if you get it, you will love it. It not, you will be bored to death.
4/4