Sorry, didn't do it for me

Rating: 6/10 (3 March 2007)

I was excited to see this. I think I heard somewhere that Scorsese called it the best movie of the 90's. I'm not sure whether that's true, but it got me fired up. Other people said good things. It was like post-release hype.
Okay, well, I put this baby in the DVD player and let 'er rip. But, she really didn't rip.
It started out with Caviezel (he's still relatively unknown, unfortunately, even after a bunch of big films) AWOL on an island of indigenous peoples he likes for their innocence. Then a ship comes and picks him up, and Sean Penn yells at him. They have this relationship throughout the movie.
Caviezel doesn't like war, so the writer seemed to figure: "let's have him say poetic-sounding things while we show shots of nature - people will think it's deep." Okay, well, I'd say about an hour of the 2 hour 40 minute movie is dedicated to this voice-over narration. It gets old. Quickly.
The film's story revolves around taking control of a Japanese controlled island in the Pacific. There are some battle scenes that are expertly done. These are definitely the strong points of the movie. I think that if they had focused more on these and done more of a "Black Hawk Down" approach, this would have been a tremendous film. But of course, we had to make it anti-war. Aside from that being pretty clichéd at this point, it wasn't handled all that well. A friend of mine told me that he didn't care for this movie, citing his opinion that "it was boring - war films shouldn't be boring." I'm not saying that it should have to be a blood-filled gore fest of testosterone-inducing violence, I can appreciate slower, thoughtful films, but, with the exception of about 15 minutes of intense battle scenes, this really was just... boring.
The acting was fine. Nolte is definitely a strong point, and Caviezel is fine. Brody isn't given much to do, though, and Travolta has only about 3 minutes of screen time. Clooney has even less.
I suppose that this film is "technically" good, as in acting, cinematography, etc, are all fine, but I think that the issue came in the editing process. They made it way too long , and they focused on all the wrong things. I don't see war films to see shots of nature, I see them because they should be compelling, they should have action, and they should definitely not be boring. Sorry, But I don't think that The Thin Red Line meets these criteria.