"There ain't no other world where everything's all right. There's just this one. Just this rock."

Rating: 10/10 (31 January 2007)

The account was always that Terrence Malick's return to cinema was in some sense going to be the Pacific foil for Saving Private Ryan, the start and finish of the incidental year of WWII films. That reductive summation evaporates with the apprehension of the solitary opening string chord and the foggy grey-green image of a crocodile, descending into a swamp, slowly sinking beneath the slime. Little in our typical experience as moviegoers prepares us for this class of audio-visual dialect. The movie has a colossal cast, but if it has a "main" character, it's Jim Caviezel's Pvt. Witt, ecstatically AWOL somewhere in a Pacific subregion. He exists in resplendent paradise, relishing the pattern of a life influenced only by naturethat's when the patrol boat recovers him.
Nevertheless, upon being been reprimanded by Sean Penn's benumbed 1st Sgt. Walsh, he wafts into the film's immense ensemble, though his effort to square war's cruelty with the serene South Pacific remains at the film's heart. Sure, the movie has a narrative drive. It's about the campaign to seize Guadalcanal. Throughout the days spent conquering a hill, a swarming throng of people happen before us, some consistent, some essential for intermittent scenes or moments. Woody Harrelson's completely shocking final scene is the most heartrending of its kind, and some of the inimitable actor's most outstanding work. Despite Adrien Brody's outrage at the streamlining of his role, his eyes speak volumes. Save Witt and Walsh, the relationships given the most elucidation include the clash between Nick Nolte's Lieutenant Colonel and Elias Koteas' Captain over the extent to which either can squander lives for victory, and Ben Chaplin, who struggles to endure by grasping at recollections of his wife, but never does the action fully pledge itself to the viewpoint of a single character.
It's partly this breakdown of movie storytelling that makes this blindsidingly emotional landscape of sacrifice, violence, empathy, humanity and melancholy perhaps the penultimate war film of all time, and while it's not simply, or centrally, a great war movie, it absolutely is one. It's the reason why the picture accomplishes the grand uniformity that war is believed to beget in its soldiers. Lacking one dominant figure is a distinct infrequency in war films. The film steamrolls all contrived features in which movie characters are given a pecking order. Here, the dominant figure is Charlie Company itself.
Indeed, The Thin Red Line is an effort to construct a film in the figure of warfare, to make the film itself cacophonous and purely visceral, instead of to imitate reality. The creation of Malick's battle sequences have an impact of being incessantly unacquainted with where blasts, clatter and movement are emanating from, having your thoughts transited through incidental moments. It is, however, one of the most fluid films, at least purely in terms of feeling, I've ever seen, because single moments definitely resolve themselves, like one of the film's most enduring images, a butterfly fluttering past terrified, scurrying soldiers, merrily unaffected by them.
One can understand the film as a portrayal of how war in humankind devastates nature, stability and the soul, but Witt's opening thoughts, and therefore the opening shot of the crocodile, seem to tell another tale, that conflict and brutality are already there, that humankind is simply an expansion of it. To that end, practically every soldier gets some occasion to ponder life, sorrow, beauty and harmony. Over each lush summit and riverbend, the movie presents unlimited uncertainties. Malick's return to filmmaking is in some ways distinct from his preceding masterworks, but in its curious meditation on the light and shadow in the human core, the part of God in our feelings and actions and the contradictions that rule our passions, Malick's film is endemic to his foregoing work. As per his pure-form custom, dialogue is regularly overwhelmed by environmental commotion, and performances and implications are elucidated by a gushing configuration of arresting visual and aural unions that elegantly fuses with John Toll's euphoric, shockingly exquisite imagery.