Wings Of The Desire meets The Deer Hunter.... in the worst kind of way.

Rating: 4/10 (25 January 2012)

The Thin Red Line has some brilliant photography. It's fantastic, and it is always been Terrence Malick's talent to film on fantastic locations and get visuals that come across as poetic and meaningful. It's a philosophically driven movie, using voice overs to share its ideas. But the movie makes it point 40 minutes in, making the movie more insufferable to watch. As opposed to Wings Of Desire, the points evolved with the movie, and seeing as Wenders also had a strong eye for photography, managed to evolve them and keep them more and more interesting. The Thin Red Line is an often repetitive movie, there is a strong sense that it is going no where.
The whole entire conception that Malick makes in a philosophical sense is that nature and war are connected to men. Their is different interpretations, but those seem to be the main three ideas. Being released in the same year as Saving Private Ryan, it seemed rather cliché to compare them, so I avoided thinking about SPR whilst watching it. But as a war movie.... it isn't horrific at all.The soldiers have hardly, if any back story whatsoever, the scenes that they have a wife, seem so cliché and one- dimensional. The Thin Red Line is more of a novel than it is of a movie, it needs to show us more, how it effects men, how it is corrupt, how it changes the environment.... things Platoon and The Deer Hunter did masterfully, whereas The Thin red line falters.
The whole film lacks direction, and it is much needed.