A long, winding poem.

Rating: 7/10 (28 March 1999)

Malick's long-awaited intellectual response to Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN winds its way across the screen like a deep slow river. Awash in the glory of living nature...hills of singing grass, brilliant birds, rich, black earth...the film is set almost entirely in voice over. From the internal voices of the Guadal Canal soldiers we learn of their fears, expectations, fragile hopes for survival, attempts to make sense of the pounding war. There are moments in the film of extreme beauty, extreme sadness and a thicker, more somber profundity than is often seen at the American cinema. The most clear and uncomfortable moments in the film occur as the American soldiers mingle with, abuse, humiliate, and then, at times, painfully identify with a group of captured Japanese. The face of a young Japanese man, destroyed in a grenade attack, can be seen through the shifting dirt of a ruined jungle, his thoughts speak the hardest and most poetic truth of the film: loving truth, loving good, loving beauty will not save you from the brutality, the subhumaness of war. Malick has etched a visual and linguistic poem for the screen, but it is a long poem and one with little hard plot. The Thin Red Line captures the fleeting thought, the smallest moments and strings them together against a natural backdrop of uncommon splendor. Don't go for thrills, go to sit back, listen, and wonder along with these soldiers why we do it again and again and again.