I'm still waiting for Jones' book...

Rating: 4/10 (31 July 2013)

To be made into a movie. This is not it. Other than pilfering a few character names, a few quotes, and the title, Malick's Thin Red Line is so far removed from Jones' novel as to almost be unrecognizable.
Jones' flowing fictional narrative based on his Company's actions at Guadalcanal from disembarking the ship to embarkation is a brutally realistic portrayal of infantry life and the nuances of combat in the mountains of Guadalcanal. Malik retains none of this brilliance and ops for art house melodrama on some fantasy island with no discernible resemblance to the actual local.
Malik takes the character of Witt, a secondary character in the novel, who was a racist Kentuckian rabble rouser with a penchant for shirking duty when his superiors annoyed him, and portrays as some kind of Christ figure. He begins the film living in noble savage utopia among the peaceful Melanesian natives. In reality these natives used to ambush Japanese patrols and sell their corpses to the US Marines for candy. Solomon Island tribes have a long history of tribal warfare, but Malik would have use believe it is the touch of the industrialized world that has suddenly corrupted their virgin paradise.
The next glaring departure from the novel I noticed was the character of Lt. Col Tall. In the novel he was a younger man, an overachiever to be sure, but a capable and brave commander. Malik decided to go with the old heartless commander routine. Malik concocts a scene were John Travolta plays a General who takes advantage of an aging Tall's desire to make rank at the expense of troops. In the film Tall is shown disinterested in artillery, declaring that it is used only to give the ground troops the perception that they are giving the enemy hell. In the novel Tall was a huge fan of artillery and blasted away at the mountain for hours before deploying the company. In addition, in the novel, the protagonists followed two other companies who had attempted to take the same hill the day before. Maybe it is in the five hour cut, but I doubt it, where Jones describes how the Japanese prominently displayed the heads of dead American, on pikes, with their severed genitalia shoved in their mouths as a warning to the soldiers that followed. I guess that wouldn't fit the narrative.
I go on for much longer, but my point is made. The movie is not a cinematic depiction of Jones' novel, it doesn't accurately depict infantry life, or life on Guadalcanal, and it gives us no insight into the Battle. That's what makes it pretentious, and that's what makes it a bad movie. It is ultimately preaching to the choir. Those who like this kind of movie, and who agree with the narrative, will gush about it. To me it was uncompelling.