Terrific and Tense

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 1999)

It didn't take long for a better film, a more effective film, than Saving Private Ryan to come along!
Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line is a flawed yet superb war movie; without those annoying Hollywood American Flags waving and one where you do care about the characters. After all, who among audiences really gave a damn about Private Ryan? That was the problem with Spielberg's film.
We often don't even learn who the Private Ryans in The Thin Red Line are before they die, but it still seems to matter a lot more. The soldiers in The Thin Red Line are to a large extent anonymous, grimy and nameless, but they're human. They're us.
The Unknown Soldier is after all a most powerful image, because he or she could be any one of us. But to have this perspective we need to be encouraged to focus beyond the bullets and the blood, the screams of terror and pain and this is what Malick has achieved. And that's in spite of absolutely riveting battle scenes.
The Thin Red Line was filmed in The Port Douglas area near Cairns and this area is painted very prettily indeed. This is a small problem for locals in the early section of the film because it's hard to accept that the movie is set in Guadalcanal instead of North Queensland. Guadalcanal was the site of a vicious battle between the Japanese and the Americans which occurred a year after Pearl Harbour.
Malick muses beyond the conflict though, often deadening the sounds, swinging the camera away from the terror in a man's eyes onto the beauty of nature; a passing beautiful butterfly. Or he'll have a soldier in the midst of carnage, nose in the dirt, hiding from death, concentrating on the way dew or blood drips down grass stalks. And that's what must have happened. And that seems much more important than the bullets ricocheting by, as long as the bullets miss.
We can easily see the point. This is Malick's preoccupation. Why kill? Why fight? Why why, when our Earth (and our North Queensland) is so beautiful. Basic stuff, but we humans so often miss the point don't we.
The film has a big name cast although some like John Travolta and George Clooney are only on screen for a few moments. Travolta is important though playing a hateful Captain, pulling rank on an older, smarting Lt Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) setting up Nolte's character beautifully. Tall's a career soldier who is willing to sacrifice men for his own advancement and glory within the army.
But there's little else in The Thin Red Line in the way of rounded characters. The soldiers are only trying to survive, and win (stop) the battle. Soldiers in the film begin to assert their individuality and then often Malick drops them. Sometimes he has them killed.
There are relationships that mean little in the context of the movie and they should have been cut. Sean Penn although interesting could have been left out altogether. The film needs to be half an hour shorter, and that's its only fault.
But still The Thin Red Line is a terrific film. Malick is a thoughtful director. He adds voice overs and asides about how stupid the battle process is even though it's doubtful that any of these soldiers would have had the time or the inclination to muse on the human condition. It's an unusual tactic by a director but effective.
He often shifts the view away from the obvious and that gets us thinking. War sometimes must be like that. Extreme fear will cause the brain to disengage; to self protect; to shut down sensory input. The Thin Red Line emphases this and also the opposite. It's an exciting, tense war film that is also philosophical. Don't miss it.