War poem

Rating: 7/10 (3 March 2009)

To its credit, The Thin Red Line is a novel approach to the war movie genre, which otherwise tends to be rather formulaic. It's a war movie that also tries to display the thoughts of its characters, and it visually showed me the war in the Pacific in a way I hadn't seen before -- for instance, by showing us not just soldiers but at least some of the native inhabitants of the islands (although basically as mute savages).
I didn't really enjoy the long poetic stretches though, at least not on DVD. I thought they were too elaborate, too well formulated to be realistic, and too ditzy. It's something that came across better when I saw this movie for the first time in a proper cinema.
The narration has its flaws, too. It was only after I read the synopsis on Wikipedia that I learned that Pt Witt had gone AWOL with the natives prior to the main events of the film; before, I always wondered how he got to hang out with them. Apparently the movie was heavily rearranged during editing and many scenes ended up on the cutting room floor (I would have loved to have seen Mickey Rourke in this!), so that may account for the choppy narration. It's also difficult to follow the individual story threads as the film switches around quite a bit, and those actors all look pretty much alike (all Latin lover types except Nick Nolte).
Oh, and I thought that the shell-shocked soldier ranting on about "Leaves! In the wind! That's what we are!" was too histrionic.
So, this movie may not live up to all its aspirations, but it's still absolutely watchable. And as always in war movies there are muscular, rippling torsoes a-plenty, if that's your cup of tea.