Only around people

Rating: 10/10 (9 March 2014)

It's tempting sometimes for those who write a movie review to treat it as a math test: count the mistakes to see how good it is.
Terrence Malick's sprawling, humanistic The Thin Red Line transcends that. In theory, its flaws are there for all to see. Structurally, it's a mess. It's too long. Pacing in the second half is cumbrous and stammering, the task to squeeze a final cut from all filmed material reportedly herculean. Cameos by celebrities like Clooney or a pencil moustached Travolta in unsubstantial roles are more a jarring distraction than an asset.
And yet... as John Toll's luscious cinematography shows atolls with crystal-clear waters, jungles pierced by sun rays, crocodiles sinking in swamps and snakes slithering on emerald grass, something unique happens. The Thin Red Line goes beyond a war movie about Guadalcanal and becomes richly textured, engrossing epic. Armies clash, and so do different philosophies. Malick plays with time and memory, quotes Proust, Homer and the Gospel, imbues the movie with a mystical quality. The five major players - Caviezel, Koteas, Penn, Chaplin and Nolte - provide deeply felt performances, while Zimmer crafts an haunting score enriched by Melanesian songs of rare beauty.
Malick's best, and on the short list of cinema's greatest movies, The Thin Red Line is a breathing, pulsating thing, incomplete and flawed and awe-inspiring as life itself can be.