Review of The Thin Red Line (1998) by Christopher C — 02 May 2013

At first I was confused with the film upon the first viewing, mostly due to the influence of other 'modern classics' like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. After several viewings I fall in love with it. Limiting the film's identity to a war/anti-war picture or try to understand the film's points as various argument/statements about what "war" and "natural" are will be missing the film's aims. The narrations of the soldiers are not demand for explanation but as the expression of a certain craving that the explanation cannot satisfy. Like Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven, it establishes a careful middle-distance from the circumstances of its characters, disarming the processes of audience identification and implication for all but the briefest of moments.

Sure the overall film is uneven, compare to the simpler and smaller-scaled Badlands and Days of Heaven. The initial cut of the film is 6 hours. After a serious of cut and paste, Malick came up with a film that went under 3 hour. You can almost feel that this is not a complete film with bits and pieces missing, for example, there is a scene of the Japanese bombing the airfield that has very little spatial continuity with the scenes before or after it. After all, this is a Malick film, which always has the constant flow of images with little actual continuity that make each image a discrete world existing on its own rather than a part of perceptual information. You can only feel the overwhelming power of the images that are not degenerated into signs or symbols.

As a war film, there has truly never been one quite like The Thin Red Line: a kind of lyric epic poem about the way men are transformed for good by the experience of war, without the usual banalities and redundant statement about war like other films of the same genre. Too bad it is not as well-receiving critically and financially as Saving Private Ryan. This is definitely a modern war classic.