Pretentious rubbish with mediocre acting

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2013)

After hearing so many good things about this film, I decided to watch it to form my own opinion. I went into it with high expectations, but came out extremely disappointed. I thought this would be a good war movie, where great actors give great performances. But I was wrong.
The Thin Red Line is supposed to be a war film, but it's not. It's like a documentary on Asian wildlife mixed with the thoughts of a confused pseudo-intellectual teenager, who is constantly high on acid and happens to be in a battle. The film doesn't really have a main character, but you could say that it's the character played by Jim Caviezel. His story revolves around two things. The first is his girlfriend who is back home. He regularly thinks about her in weird, meaningless flashbacks where she is on the swing or looking at the sea. The second thing his story revolves around is showing us beautiful nature scenes accompanied by idiotic philosophical voice-overs.
In its three hours the film follows a pattern. First you get some nature scenes that look very nice. Then for a short while it turns into a normal war film with characters behaving rationally and actually fighting a battle, but then people with questionable acting skills take over and start behaving abnormally while uttering very strange lines. Finally Jim Caviezel's character shows up, and bores us with his opinion on war and stupid flashbacks that involve his girlfriend. Now I mentioned questionable acting skills, which brings me to the cast of this film. The film supposedly features big names like: Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, John Cusack, and many more. But don't be fooled, Sean Penn has a good deal of screen time, but gives an extremely bland performance, George Clooney shows up for about half a minute near the end in a role that could have been played by your next-door neighbour. The other big names just stand around in pointless scenes without adding anything. There is one exception though, and that is Nick Nolte. Nolte manages to squeeze in a good bit of screen time and make a stupidly written character quite interesting by giving a good performance throughout the film. In fact, I would award the film an extra point because of his performance.
I did not like this film at all. It's a mess that tries to combine a World War 2 battle with a romantic subplot accompanied by pretentious, philosophical rambling. A lot of actors give mediocre performances, or just stand around without adding anything. The only good thing is the cinematography. There are a lot of scenes with beautiful shots of the surrounding environment, but unfortunately it doesn't save this abomination of a picture. I have rarely been so disappointed by a film, and I have never seen such a pretentious work of rubbish in my entire life.