Overall a triumph, however if only....

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2012)

The Thin Red Line is a very difficult film to review. I watched it a couple of nights back and have attempted to write a review several times. However each time I felt I was approaching it with either too positive a slant or too negative.
When TRL is good, it is truly brilliant. It seems like every emotion of war is captured so perfectly. The terror, the heroism, the triumph, the guilt, the acceptance of fate, even the monotony. The intensity achieved in the capture of a strategic bunker has rarely been matched in any film, of any genre. The raid on a Japanese camp captured some of the most haunting shots I've ever seen, featuring scenes which were as tragic as anything in Schindlers List. There are some beautiful performances as well, from Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin and Dash Mihok in particular.
If only Malick had known what he wanted to achieve when he set out, he could surely have made the greatest war film of all time. The first edit came in at five hours, and a whole host of famous faces were entirely cut by the time the final version was settled on. A number of others were left with little more than cameos, meaning we never got a chance to know them as characters so we remember them as Woody Harrelson, John Travolta, George Clooney, John Cusack etc. No genre of film relies on the audience seeing the cast as real people rather than actors more than a war film, given the intrinsic link between cinema and reality. This is what makes Malicks decision to cast so many well known faces all the more head scratching (although it is important to remember that many of the ones featured in the final cut and previous cuts were much less known then).
Having said that, what is left is still a fine movie, beautifully shot (excepting for the occasional art for arts sake moment) with one of the finest scores I've heard in a long time. It speaks volumes of Malick that despite the obvious flaws in his approach, he was still able to produce such an affecting film.