A Beautiful Philosophical Meditation on War Damage

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2005)

My husband, who watches the War Channels constantly, hated "Thin Red Line" because it was certainly not a conventional war movie. I think it should be compared to Kurasawa's epic films. I let myself float with it.
Certainly WWII is used as an excuse to meditate on war in general, from a post-Vietnam perspective. I did have to ask my husband for some particulars on Guadacanal and he noted some things that were correct in the movie (the unpreparedness of the military who just threw 1000s of recruits into battle slaughter) and inaccuracies (at one point a key character defends his men because he's been in battle with them for 2 1/2 years - my husband chortled that no American served in WWII that long at the point when the movie takes place, certainly not in the Pacific, as they served from Pearl Harbor to V-J day, from '44 to '45. He just meant that at the time the sergeant was speaking in the film he couldn't have served for 2 1/2 years with those men in the Pacific theater because that battle started in 8/42, 9 months after the war started and the movie seems to take place at the beginning of the battle. Guadacanal ended 2/43, which still wouldn't be 2 1/2 years).
But this was the first war movie that makes the visual case of war as anti-environmental.
John Toll's cinematography is staggering beautiful. This is not a movie to rent on video but to see in a wide screen theater.
Famous hunky actors come and go in visual and auditory cameos, much like they did in "The Longest Day"; clearly all the Best Young Actors were dying to play soldier, but they are so dirty it's sometimes hard to tell them apart--but that's like war too. (Hey wasn't that John Cusack? Whoa, it was him! Hey isn't that John Savage sort of replaying his character from "Deer Hunter"? Yeah it was.)
The romantic memories are some of the most beautiful romantic visuals I've ever seen in the movies, but then all the images are breathtaking, but that makes the realization that war destroys love too all the more shocking.
If "Saving Private Ryan," which used every war movie cliché of the past 50 years, was about realism in war movies, "Thin Red Line" is about the philosophy of war (with a few anthropological clichés thrown in).
(originally written 1/24/1999)