The Thin Red Line
by Terrence Malick
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DVD details
Actor: James Caviezel, Kirk Acevedo, Nick Nolte, Penelope Allen, Sean PennDirector: Terrence Malick
Writer: Terrence Malick
Producer: George Stevens Jr.
Producer: Grant Hill
Producer: John Roberdeau
Producer: Michael Stevens
Producer: Robert Michael Geisler
Writer: James Jones
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 170 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-05-21
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of The Thin Red Line
DVD Review: Good movie
Summary: 4 Stars
Good movie, my husband especially liked it like most of the war movies we've seen. Would recommend it to my friends.DVD Review: finest anti-war film I've seen
Summary: 5 Stars
a mesmerizingly beautiful film on life, death, love, and the senselessness of war. While the film traces several characters it's amazing how you're left with a lasting impression of the interior landscapes of each and every one. Sean Penn leaves an indelible mark. The film is both spiritual meditation and a completely corporal rendition of the atrocities of warfare. DVD Review: Great Movie--Requires Some Patience
Summary: 5 Stars
The problem with many of the reviews is you cannot watch The Thin Red Line once and presume to be capable of judging it. It is a work of art--appreciating it is difficult without watching it more than once. This is no ordinary war film--the goal is to think and incite thoughts.
This film would have been better as a mini-series or long television drama--say something more like Generation Kill. Character development is not a strong point, as Malick needed more time than a feature film could offer. At the same time, it could have been cut to 90 minutes as an action film and would have likely been a hit, but that wasn't Malick's goal.
Watch this film as you would a mini-series....in 3 separate sittings, about an hour apiece. A Thin Red Line is too intense and too complicated to be swallowed all at once. After two hours any art can be tiresome, and the inner contemplative monologues (from the novel) featured here could weary the most patient viewer. Upon later viewings, the poetry comes to life and one sees how it relates to what is happening.
What makes this film great is the cinematography, the landscape, the music, the lyrics from the book, and some splendid acting. The infantry attack sequences are breathtaking and the camera work and musical sequences complement them perfectly. The film's emotional and artistic climax comes with the storming of a Japanese camp at the top of a hill after days of horrific fighting. This 15 minute segment ought to be shown in film schools around the world.
Does "A Thin Red Line" stand up to other great war films? No, it's not in the company of "Apocalypse Now" or "Full Metal Jacket". But it compares well to Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan (both of which are also excellent). It's definitely worth watching if you like war movies or enjoy great cinema.
DVD Review: Stink, stank, stunk
Summary: 1 Stars
The thing that made "The Thin Red Line" a flawed war movie for me was the way some of the characters were cast and/or filmed in a way that made them undistinguishable from each other. They were supposed to be guys you could follow, but looked so similar they became a few more faces in the crowd with extra camera time.
Next, the thing they did that STUNK it up for me is...
* * * * SPOILER to follow * * * *
...the way they showed the American soldiers brutalizing the Japanese, namely the most vulnerable ones. Pulling teeth from the wounded and killing the nonthreatening guys (the Japanese soldiers surrendering or in the act of praying on their knees).
We got to see the praying guys get shot and bayonetted more than once in this film, sometimes in slow motion from the first person point of view. In TTRL's later segments, the way our guys were cutting the enemy down when there was no fight in them was hardly cathartic in the way that, say, "We Were Soldiers" went when we took the attack to the enemy. But in this film, the enemy became so passive in the wake of our regular sadistic brutality that toward the end you almost wanted to see our guys get popped. I don't mind a "War is hell" theme, but not mixed with a "boo for our side."
DVD Review: A beautiful film
Summary: 4 Stars
This film in my opinion is an epic combination of sight, sound, and performance. Nick Nolte's role was Oscar worthy. It is the most powerful, gutteral, desperate, portrayal of a combat commander ever filmed. There is no fluff, no contrived dialogue, only a soldier pushing for the victory that has eluded him his entire life, his generation's life. Koteas as Cpt. Starles is excellent, as are Caviezel, Cusack, Chaplin, and Penn. The philosophical meanderings and voice over take quite a bit of flack. I think one needs to be reminded that these are not fully formed men we're observing. These are 18 year old boys standing on the brink of savagery, murder, and anihilation. When they have time to ponder their situation, how would you expect them to think, how deep and meaningful is the philosophy of an 18 year old? These boys that have been thrown into the meat grinder are dealing with the horror that is confronting them, and posessing them, the best that they can. They get drunk, foul themselves, cry, run away, attack, and sometimes converse with the only others who can possibly relate. The cogs in this war machine are individuals, each carrying their own baggage, wounds, sucesses, and failures. Expose them to combat and these things either melt away and reform, or they galvanize and remain in state. That is what the film is about to me.
Description of The Thin Red Line
A powerful frontline cast - including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson and George Clooney - explodes into action in this hauntingly realistic view of military and moral chaos in the Pacific during World War II.One of the cinema's great disappearing acts came to a close with the release of The Thin Red Line in late 1998. Terrence Malick, the cryptic recluse who withdrew from Hollywood visibility after the release of his visually enthralling masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978), returned to the director's chair after a 20-year coffee break. Malick's comeback vehicle is a fascinating choice: a wide-ranging adaptation of a World War?II novel (filmed once before, in 1964) by James Jones. The battle for Guadalcanal Island gives Malick an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure philosophical noodling--or simply let the camera contemplate the first steps of a newly birthed tropical bird, the sinister skulk of a crocodile. This is not especially an actors' movie--some faces go by so quickly they barely register--but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private (newcomer Jim Caviezel). The picture's sprawl may be a result of Malick's method of "finding" a film during shooting and editing, and in some ways The Thin Red Line seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete. Yet it casts a spell like almost nothing else of its time, and Malick's visionary images are a challenge and a signpost to the rest of his filmmaking generation. --Robert Horton
This serious-minded but flawed effort at bringing James Jones's later World War II novel to the screen might have languished in film vaults had reclusive director Terence Malick not resurfaced with a newer version, the likely spur to this video release. This first attempt, lensed in 1964, offers glimpses of what may have attracted Malick to the project.
Jones's story focuses on two American soldiers during the Guadalcanal campaign, the newlywed draftee Private Doll (Keir Dullea) and Sergeant Welch (Jack Warden), the hardened veteran. Doll is determined to survive whatever the cost, disobeying orders if it will improve his chances; Welch is dutiful yet calculating, resorting to deliberate acts of madness to toughen up his troops by showing them war's own absurdity by example. The clash between the private and the sergeant thus becomes the core to the film, focusing on the "thin red line" between sanity and insanity and depicting how that line blurs for both protagonists.
As directed by veteran Andrew Marton (55 Days in Peking), the film is at its best during sweeping battle sequences capturing the gritty horror of hand-to-hand combat, as the Americans try to take an impregnable wall of caves held by the Japanese enemy. Less successful are portentous scenes and dialogue that underscore this evident parable with a heavy hand; there's a self-conscious art film spin that misfires.The original black-and-white Cinemascope negative shows wear and tear, and early copies betray serious problems in their optical transfers. --Sam Sutherland
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