the emperor has no clothes

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 1999)

I don't like war movies because I hate to see violence, so I would have thought a film purporting to examine the psychological impact of the horrors of war would be right up my alley. But I hated this film as I have not hated a film in a long time. Having read the comments of the film's supporters, I get the impression that I'm just not smart enough or film-savvy enough to get the beauty of this film. Sorry, kids, although I acknowledge that it was pretty to look at, I refuse to believe that the film's inaccessibility makes it great art.
I found absolutely nothing to anchor me in tnis movie. I turned to my companion 30 minutes into it and asked him, "Did we miss the first reel?" I didn't have the first idea who the characters were. When the captain tells some of his men after the big battle, "you are like my sons" I thought, "who are these guys?" Was I supposed to know how he felt about them from his behavior or from any of the action of the film? Because I didn't. The whole scene came out of nowhere and went nowhere. Take that one complaint and apply it to every character and every scene (except the climaxes of the various battles) and you have my experience of the film.

I haven't read the book, but I did check out the reader comments on it in Amazon.com. Apparently THE THIN RED LINE is a very gritty, realistic take on Guadalcanal told from multiple viewpoints of C-company's soldiers. It would seem that this film is trying to be faithful the floating viewpoint, but I can hardly believe that the book's use of this device was as confusing as the movie's. Aside from not being able to distinguish one voice from another, my main problem is that the film kept an aesthetic distance from all of the characters so that when someone's voice-over was giving you his point of view it all melded together and seemed universally banal. Doesn't the judicious use of specificity make the universal more meaningful? Maybe the ultimate point of the film is that we will all end up dead and nothing matters, but I hardly think that boring me to death is the most effective way to make the point.
I couldn't wait for this film to end. It was all I could do to restrain myself from standing up in the theatre and screaming, "Is anyone else here as bored as I am?" Weirdly enough, as much as I hate violence, I kept longing for some to relieve the tedium.
I have sat through a 4 hour film about Mongolian women warriors (Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia) and loved it. I have also sat through an 11-hour play (Peter Brook's THE MAHABHARATA) with no trouble. I can't believe that my negative experience of this movie is entirely my fault.