The Thin Red Line | 
 enlarge | Director: Terrence Malick
Actors: Kirk Acevedo, Penelope Allen, Benjamin Green, Simon Billig, Mark Boone Junior
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy Used: $1.41
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Rating:  929 reviews
Sales Rank: 8612
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dts Surround Sound, Dvd-video, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 170 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6
MPN: FOXD2003001D
UPC: 024543030003
EAN: 0024543030003
ASIN: B00005PJ8T
Theatrical Release Date: January 8, 1999
Release Date: May 21, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Media ONLY. Good Condition. This item comes with no original case, box, sleeve or artwork. 30 Day Guarantee!. Discs, tapes and games will ship in clear generic case. This item MAY have been a previous rental.
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Amazon.com essential video
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
Amazon.com
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
Product Description
Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 05/13/2008
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| Customer Reviews: Read 495 more reviews...
 Crossing the Line November 16, 2008
R. J MOSS (Alice Springs, Australia)
Malik's epic anti-war treatise is less effective on repeat and its pitch at the sublime is best savoured on big-screen theatre darkness to work its magic. Much of the necessary swatches of sky through tree canopy, macro nature, and shifting light over sussurating grasses, the ephphanies experienced from the Christ-like Caviezel used to counter the violence of combat terror, is lost on small format. Initially, the film moved me. Now, and with the pretentious,'New World', added to Malik's oeuvre, I side with those who experience tedium, while holding that it is an incomparably better film. The lack of character development is essential to the director's overview; their parts clearly serve the director's philosophy. Yet there are stunning cameo roles from Nolte, Penn, and Cavizel. It is one of the few war films that delve into the individual fear and deaths of the combatants. But there's too much repetition, even given that...flashbacks to the young bride, Penn's pessimistic utterances, the musings of the Jim Caviezel character which verge on a parody of Tarkovskian metaphysical doubt. He alone seems bent on a spiritual quest to redeem the self midst the atrocities, and a theosophic strain leaks through his pronouncements. His self-sacrifice is inevitable. A half-hour edit would profit the audience, and I would nominate this final section. But who could seriously quibble with an American director pitching at the transcendental, a glimpse of a better and redemptive world than the one thrust upon the terrorised youth depicted. Malick, bravely, went for the big picture in this one and must have felt to the far side of his culture in the act of doing so.
 So listlessly boring, I remember almost nothing October 27, 2008
Andariel Halo (Phenomynouss@hotmail.com is my real e-mail)
I saw this movie in theaters when it first came out. I was a child, then, 10 or 11 years old. Maybe I should have been set up to be bored, but even looking back on it now, ten years later, I find myself justified in claiming it boring.
Even as a child, I wasn't the sort easily bored by adult-type movies. I could sit through a movie like "Courage Under Fire" and be entertained. This one, however, had about two scenes of action, and the rest just people lounging around talking to themselves.
First they try a D-Day style mock-up beach landing, only there's no one firing at them from the beach, so that ends up looking awkward, whether or not it happened in real life. Then comes a charge up a hill, where there is ACTION~! Then the soldiers make it into a village, where the spend the remaining 1.5-2 hours living among the people, talking to themselves, thinking about stuff, and doing pretty much absolutely nothing, either physically or mentally, with no content left to excite World War II studiers either in the form of action, strategy, or insight.
What you get instead is these characters, most of which are given no time or chance to develop into more than caricatures of generic emotions or archetypes, rambling about their lives with random images and hammy philosophy.
At the end, the Japanese attack the village and all the soldiers run or die. And I'm left wondering exactly why the film even existed.
And then I remember this is the same director who made "The New World", another movie with half a page of plot, and thirty pages of people frolicking about to cinematography and pretentious attempts at being an "art film", so that anyone who comes out of the film not liking it can simply be scoffed at with the typical "You just don't get it. Typical stupid American needing your car chases and shoot-outs to be entertained" manifesto.
Well I'm not a stupid American who needs car chases and shoot-outs to be entertained. I shed real tears of emotion at Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood". I gape in amazement at the drama of such movies as "Twelve Angry Men" and "Midnight Cowboy", laugh at movies ranging from "The Big Lebowski" and "Annie Hall" to "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters", and even get thrills from action movies like "Casino Royale" or "Munich".
This film has no categorization; it is a run-on sentence of a movie. It is powerfully empty nothingness, just film on a reel and nothing of substance.
"Thin Red Line" or "Thin Plot Line" October 17, 2008
Perceptive Reader (Ohio)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I am shocked by the number of glowing reviews this movie received - I saw it on opening day in a theater crowded with active duty military troops (I am a retired vet), and most got up and walked out by the half-way point! And I wish I had walked out too! Having 14 months+ in Iraq, I do not see that our troops would feel much differently about this movie today than they did back in 1999. My feelings are not based on the fact that the movie is "anti-war" - the more accurately a war movie portrays combat, the less likely it is you want to go out and advocate violence. The problem is that The Thin Red Line is very poorly executed depiction of infantry combat and does not provide either compelling characters or credible story that makes you care.
The Thin Red Line is set during one of the most pivotal battles in the Pacific, but there is non of the sense of desperation in the movie. Plot development? What plot? Character development? None of that either. Dialog? Acting? Wooden and melodramatic. The cinematography is gorgeous, but does not save the movie. How many flashbacks to a the same coconut on a beach can a man tolerate? All in all, I was absolutely bored.
If you are interested in a good war movie set in the WWII Pacific Theater of Operations I suggest The Great Raid based on actual events and adapted from William B. Breuer's book about the 1945 liberation of the Cabanatuan Prison Camp on the Philippine island of Luzon. But I suspect that many of those who have given The Thin Red Line a thumbs up would balk at the The Great Raid which in addition to being anti-war, also demonstrates why you sometimes have to fight with its opening a scene of the Japanese massacre of prisoners of war on Palawan.
 A Disappointing Film October 7, 2008
Michael Mandaville (California, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I had high hopes for this film with its inherently courageous material based upon the Guadalcanal campaign. However, the movie itself has a relentless boredom, much more like a Benneton commercial than a feature film. Malick, despite his Days of Heaven classic, lost touch with audiences and maybe even filmmaking over his 20 year absence. The art of conveying ideas and powerful visual metaphors within a story worked with David Lean. With Malick's work here, it's a whimsical, uncertain philosophical reference without meaning.
Several actors like Jim Cavizel were good to watch but overall the movie meandered so much that, when it ended, I thought that they had left off a reel of film.
Boring, Boring, Boring August 8, 2008
David Lee (USA)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
As a 24-year military veteran, this movie was a complete miss and bore for me. I couldn't wait for this slow paced movie to end! A weak storyline and none existent plot further plagued this attempt to personalize war. The overacting of Nolte and barely noticeable Penn do nothing to overcome the poor directing. I still can't grasp why some people give Penn so much credit for this and other performances. His acting skills are simplistic and unbelievable, unless the part includes a drunk or drug addict.
My advice is to skip this movie and choose one of several better alternatives.
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