Very flawed and very brilliant

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 1998)

Yes it's long, bewildering, and often pretentious, but it's also one of the most original and powerful American movies that I've seen in quite some time. Comparisons with "Saving Private Ryan" are pointless since the two movies spring from completely different artistic sensibilities, although I will say that I vastly preferred "The Thin Red Line", flaws and all, to Spielberg's movie. I also suspect that fifty years from now, long after the "Private Ryan" hype-machine has died away, Malick's movie will be seen as the better work. The movie sometimes resembled a strange mix of Sam Fuller and Andrei Tarkovsky (The opening shot is nothing short of brilliant). The spiritual and philosophical underpinnings of the film, and the way they are presented, alternate between the profound and the maddeningly pretentious. Malick seems to have bitten off more than he could chew here, and one can feel him struggling at the end to bring all of his philosophical threads together into some sort of resolution, but he just can't seem to pull it off. Still, the overall effect is both haunting and beautiful. Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker, put it nicely when he rattled off all the problems he had with it and then concluded, "But, a week after seeing 'The Thin Red Line,' I am starting to be spooked by it, and already I need to see it again." Same here.