The direct but hard route to a peak of discovery

Rating: 10/10 (2 January 2005)

After watching this a couple of nights ago, I'm pushing Thin Red Line up to my top five. Wow... WOW. What an experience. It's like a three hour, semiotic meditation on war as an encapsulation of various human conflicts and aspirations. The way in which it was executed (visually and otherwise) was rare genius.
This is not merely an anti-war film, though I can see how it is received as such. It's not quite as naive as the ones usually considered anti-war films. In this one, the experience is even richer when one knows the history surrounding the Guadacanal invasion and what was at stake... then and only then to go here to see things from the narrower perspective of these ground units... that is very engaging.
But that historical conflict itself is just the top layer in this film. We get many reference points to the depths. I'm thinking for example of the voice-overs as nude exposures of the characters' souls.

Soldiers are carried through with visions, or disturbingly peaceful memories.

The disruptions and the brutal indifference of nature. Interesting how Nick Nolte's character derives his war tactics from the same.

The inevitable but still ambiguous changes which overcome the characters who live through a hell.

At the end of it, I can see that these characters have changed profoundly, even if they don't give away too much for us to go on. But at the same time I'm not entirely sure whether they've changed for the better or for the worse. This open-endedness was subtle yet very intelligent, a rare thing for a filmmaker to believe in. It's relatively easy for actors put into hyperbolic situations to announce with trumpets a dramatic change in their character, so we can all get it and learn the same thing at the same time.
But Malick doesn't want to take us around there with an immediate and easy roundabout flank to the plateau of enlightenment like that. We will have to work our way up to that peak of discovery (self-discovery?) by the direct path of a simple enough surface story, but must strive to understand the undercurrents one slippery step at a time. And each one of us is going to ascend at our own pace because it is each our own journey of conflict.