I raise my glass to non-convention

Rating: Null/10 (5 February 1999)

The reason I enjoyed this film was because it was so unlike any other war movie I had ever seen. For me, the subtlety and non-conventional approach in "The Thin Red Line" worked, and worked well. I liked the fact that I had to strain my ears to hear what some of the characters were mumbling. I liked the fact that there were many moments on screen where there was hardly any dialogue at all. I liked the fact that sometimes, much of the time, the story being told strayed erratically and bounced all around. War is so completely alien an experience to practically all of us - I can't imagine why we somehow expect a war movie to be completely rational and easy to comprehend. As far as I am concerned, the more surreal and incomprehensible to me, the more realistic. People have complained of the long, boring moments of inaction throughout the film. Unfortunately for many movie-goers, much of the common soldier's daily existence is just like the film showed. One veteran of the American Civil War once described the soldier's life as "countless hours of profound boredom broken up by short instances of sheer terror. Yes, Saving Private Ryan was a great film in its own right, but I couldn't help but cheer for "The Thin Red Line" with its fly in the face of Hollywood/weirdo approach. Sometimes I felt like some of the dialogue in SPR was too rehearsed, too staged. When I heard through the grapevine that many of the scenes in TTRL were completely ad-libbed, (John Cusack's and Nolte's conversation on top of the hill after the successful attack, and Jim Caviezel's conversation with the native island woman and her baby at the start of the film), it made me realize why so much of the dialogue seemed so natural. Many have complained that soldiers wouldn't ever have philosophized like TTRL's characters - but come on, Ernest Hemingway was on the battlefields in WWI and the Spanish Civil War, and Wilfred Owen (who wrote some of the most spaced out WWI poetry from British trenches) was present too. Who are we to say what goes on in the heads of men facing death everyday? This was not the greatest war movie I have ever seen. Yes, it was too long. Yes, it could have used a ton of editing to make it flow more smoothly. People have trashed TTRL because subconciously they are programmed to the cookie-cutter Hollywood movie style. When something comes along that doesn't quite fit - even into the "artsy film category" - folks don't know how to deal with it. That frustrates some to the point of rage which would explain the amazing amount of lengthy, angry comments. But it intrigues others. Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but I was one of the strangely intrigued.