"Thin Red Line" is to war what "Taxi Driver" is to driving a taxi...

Rating: 10/10 (4 January 1999)

This film is about ideas, including the human condition and longings vs. human nature, not about war. War is simply the most effective vehicle with which the classic foil can be illustrated. For this reason, it is unfair to all the Platoon and Priv.
Ryan seekers to tout TRL as a war film. The setting of war was almost, but not quite, incidental. I say almost because situations as extreme as those experienced in a ground war are often necessary to draw out the extremes in human behaviour relative to their place in God's world.
Any attempt to attach a plot to TRL would have only tethered it down, and convoluted Malick's aim. The idyllic settings specked with pockets of manmade antagonism were all that was needed as a platform for Malick's inquiry into understanding ourselves. Just as DeNiro's driving a taxi put us where we needed to be to really see humanity at that level, so does the beautiful paradox of Guadalcanal put us where we need to be to experience the continuous tragedy of human nature.
Malick takes us to this point of the film almost immediately. If you were still looking for a plot or some kind of formulaic storyline by the end of the film, you missed the forest for the trees. If those who didn't appreciate the film could bear to go see it again, you would realize that the film proceeds not as a story to be told, rather as a visual and narrative poetry that bares us open completely in questioning the substance of our souls.
The Thin Red Line doesn't just open a spiritual world in a way that very few films in history have attempted to grasp. It does so with such poised reverence for the cinematic medium in its lyrical balance of sound, image and narrative, that it stands as not only the best film of the year, but one of the best film