Unbelievably superior to Private Ryan

Rating: 10/10 (30 November 2001)

In an era where war film plots have become subordinate to effects, Terrence Malick has brought us a refreshing perspective on WWII. Set in Guadalcanal, Malick (and John Toll) initially give us a vision of Paradise, only to destroy it with the coming of battle. While I'll leave the rest of the plot alone, I just want to point out how much better of a film this was than its counterpart in 1998, Saving Private Ryan. WHile 'Ryan' is a good film, its character development, conflicts, camerawork, and overall plot are inferior to 'Red Line's'.
First, Private Witt is one of the better characters to grace a movie in recent memory and the dichotomy of him and Welsh (played with great sneer by Sean Penn) sets up the conflict between Paradise and Earth. Witt, for all his foolishness in Welsh's eyes, is practically clairvoyant in that he gets it: he understands Paradise, where it is, and how it is lost. One of my favorite scenes is when he watches his own troops behave like animals and you can tell he's crushed inside because of its ugliness. This is just one example of how Malick's characters often play a bigger role than what they seem to at first. The conflicts in TTRL are wonderfully portrayed. Besides Welsh and Witt there is every man's conflict within himself (the Freudian id v. super-ego), best exemplified by Elias Koteas. Also, the viewer is never told what to think, unlike Private Ryan where Germans=Bad, Malick paints a more realistic picture, showing Japanese troops to be near the point of insanity and starvation, as though they too are victims of a much more catastrophic reality. Camerawork: John Toll and Malick create Paradise with the lens and this film is probably one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. And finally the overall plot in LIne is just better. Ryan is dependent on an ending, closure of some kind (the mission) but TTRL is never over much like its beginning is unclear, and you get the sense that the war will never be over in the minds of the characters. Also, it throws together Paradse Lost and the inner conflict of a Freudian type and mixes them to show how man can destroy himself as well as save himself.