My favorite movie of 1998

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 1999)

This film is a poem. It is a medication on war's destruction of the human spirit. Nonlinear, imagistic, subjective--ultimately it is a Buddhist tone poem. War destroys both man and nature, and man is but one part of nature. The soldier's narratives are moving. So what if soldiers don't really think like this? This film makes Private Ryan's soldiers' vernacular look fake, as if the script writers of that movie saw too many World War II movies.
What I particularly appreciated was the portrayal of the enemy. The Japanese are seen as frightened, half starved human beings. In Private Ryan the Germans were superhuman killing machines, but in Thin Red Line a soldier looks down at a Japanese face buried in the dirt and imagines his thoughts, his wishes, his dreams. The face becomes a flower. It is so moving, so beautiful.
I wish to thank Malick and the actors for creating a war film that is almost as great as the best war film ever made--Russia's Come and See.