Worst Film of 1998

Rating: 1/10 (7 April 1999)

The Thin Red Line has to be the worst movie I've seen in more than 5 years. > And for those of you reading this who still have an open mind about this movie: I really mean it. I don't exaggerate the way other people do about this kind of thing.
Let me explain what I didn't like about this movie.
#1: No Protagonist You might expect that in a movie where everyone is a young white man wearing identical army outfits, they might helpfully give people different personalities and perhaps NAMES so you can tell them apart. No such luck, I'm afraid. It's almost entirely impossible to tell when the action focuses on the character who's supposed to be the main character and when it focuses on someone else.
#2: The Concept The Concept is "War turns you into a monster." Okay, first of all, this is a tired and stupid concept, it's been done eloquently and grippingly in two of the REAL war movie classics: Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. Secondly, see point #1. The main character, barely ever named, impossible to tell apart from anyone else, is supposed to change. Well, maybe he does, but I never had a clear idea of what he was like in the first place to change... so basically this movie takes a tired concept and executes it badly.
#3: The Action This is a movie about war. Right? So you kind of expect there to be at least some good action. Well, this is very disappointing, too. The central scene of the movie is about a whole bunch of American troops trying to secure a hillside protected by a hidden Japanese bunker. There's a lot of shooting, and there are some people dying but the scene skips around all over the hill, you can never tell which group you're with or where they are or what they're supposed to be doing, so basically it's just confusing.
#4: Gore Well, without some action, it'll at least have some gore, right? SOME kind of effects? Wrong. At one point, someone is hurt by a hand grenade, and instead of showing anything, they basically just show his face with a little blood on it as he slowly dies. Basically, the best effects you can hope for are people pretending to get shot and falling over.
#5: Dialogue Why not at least have some decent lines? I have to admit, the dialogue the characters actually engage in isn't too bad, but there's this constant, confusing, rambling, pointless talking, some detached narrator goes on and on with. None of it makes sense; artistic talk like that kind of requires that you understand the character, or that you at LEAST know who's talking.
My basic complaint is, after sitting in this movie for 2 and a half hours, I still didn't know who anyone was, what was going on, what the point was, and I had stopped giving the movie a chance. This was SUCH a boring movie.
If you want to write or direct movies, part of your job is to make a story people can follow. Without that all your high-flung philosophical ideas just become confusing and pointless.