...beautiful...

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2000)

i have to say, this is my favourite film. it's not perfect, there's not a whole lot of always coherent plot but there's just so much in it that it would be blasphemy to not respect this film.
so many people come to see this film expecting to see a patriotic american war film which americans go home at the end of the day and are decorated at their honour. i had this misconception before i viewed this film so i was a bit reluctant to see it.
(don't get me wrong, i'm not xenophobic, i'm just a bit tired of war movies [they don't deserve to be called films] which follow this tiresome formula.)
as it happened, i chanced upon this film and i instantly fell in love with it. yes it is long and at times, pretentious but there's just something really really magical about it. it has a kind of aura.
i guess because of terrence Malick's unique understanding of philosophy, people with an understanding of it will see all the visual symbolism in it but then others just dismiss it in that they think they'll never 'get it'. i don't have a very knowledgable understanding of philosophy and i was still profoundly moved by this beautiful visual feast.
plot is not everything. before i saw this film, i always thought it was. in many ways, this film had a very unique feeling to it in that we were the omnipotent 'god' like figure who saw everything and realised what everyone was thinking. in all honesty, not all wars are fought with a coherent 'story' to them. in fact, the words coherency and war are just such juxtapositions to start off with that i wonder as to why we've come to expect perfectly developed stories amid a big battle. that's probably more ludicrous that what some people describe as ludicrously pretentious rantings in THE THIN RED LINE.
yes at times you don't know where it's going and you don't know what's happening but i guess that's a big feature of war...you're not always in control all the time with perfect comprehension of your surroundings. it took me three viewings to work out where they were going, what they were doing, etc. but the emotion is not on what they do but the whole experience.
i'm constantly amazed that people will without hestition, vote commercial mass market films like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan before this one. in my mind, the competition should never have started because THE THIN RED LINE is in a league separate from the films i have just mentioned and their counterparts.
i refuse to rate this film because rating itself for such a film is condescendingly patronising. instead, i will say that everyone, sit through it and then make up your mind because inevitably, there'll always be films which don't please everyone. just have an informed opinion (ie watch the whole film) before you judge.