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 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
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Avg. Customer Rating:  908 reviews
Sales Rank: 10049
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dts Surround Sound, Dvd-video, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 170
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6
MPN: D2003000D
UPC: 024543030003
EAN: 0024543030003
ASIN: B00005PJ8T
Theatrical Release Date: January 8, 1999
Release Date: May 21, 2002
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| Customer Reviews:
 Good War film July 8, 2006
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
I liked it. Plenty of action, not overblown, acting was above average, seemed believable.
 still waiting for malick to grow up July 4, 2006
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
oh, how does one deal with director terrence malick? has there ever been a director so able to create magnificent visuals yet so incapable of framing even the most elementary narrative? i doubt any other director could have attempted to film james jones's sprawling novel set against guadalcanal, and no other director could have come so close while failing so miserably. sean penn is great. the look is great. moment after moment continue to haunt, but wasnt this what we were saying about "days of heaven" 20 years earlier?
 Depressingly boring July 3, 2006
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
This film is long, boring, and offers nothing that comes close to entertainment. How else can you describe a film that jumps around with little reason or explanation. There is no story here. It's just a hodge podge of various characters who have stray thoughts while we are shown cinematograpy that makes little sense. If I wanted to watch a documentary on the beautiful wildlife of the Southeast Asian Region I would have tuned in to the Discovery Channel. What does this have to do with a war movie?
The early scenes are set somewhere in Southeast Asia where a couple of deserters are fraternizing with the natives. The next thing you know, they are back on a troop ship heading to the Guadal Canal. There's no transition here. One moment these guys are on the beach. The next minute, one of them is being lectured by Sgt. Sean Penn about the morals of being a good soldier. Did I miss something in between or was it just a bad edit?
For the next 2 and a half hours the film concentrates on a group of Americans trying to advance in the dense jungle of Guadal Canal. Yet, when the movie finally comes to a merciful end, you ask yourself "What Happened?"
There is no climax to the movie. This movie just goes on and on and on and on, then ends. No big ending. Rather, a cheap ending. The soldiers got to leave the war. That's it.
Poignant, Haunting........... June 6, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Thin Red Line is a film that combines different themes into a memorable experience. There are spiritualistic and to be sure, philosophical overtones throughout the entire film. In my judgement, these attributes in no way take away from the fact that this is one stout war movie with very realistic and well shot battle scenes. They amply add to it.
The movie unfolds not as a good novel would read but rather as some great and extended piece of poetry.
Along the way, you come to understand different soldier's perspectives from their various narrations of their thoughts about the war and their place in it. The film flows as a segment of different character stories. Motivations are often revealed by way of the narrations or the character comes right out and says it. This is the case for Nick Nolte's character.
The movie is a non-formulaic type of film. In other words, there really isn't a concise plot sprinkled with subplots, that wraps neatly up by the end of the movie like "Platoon" or " Saving Private Ryan" (also very good movies ) Rather, it's a 'this happened and here's the way events unfolded' story.......so, come along for the journey and get an unvarnished look at how it was, how it happened and what the men who were there did and what they were like.
The cinematography is majestic. The musical score is deep and true to the flow of the film. The acting is wholly convincing and as mentioned above, the battle scenes and action is solid.
A different kind of war movie the likes of which probably won't be duplicated nor even attempted again.
Is It War, Or Is It A Method-Actors' Workshop At A Faux-Military Paintball Course? June 1, 2006
3 out of 10 found this review helpful
This past Memorial Day I felt like watching an American war film to honor American troops' past sacrifices, and so I decided to revisit Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), loosely based on James Jones' autobiographical novel concerning the American-Japanese war of Guadalcanal in World War II.
Malick is to moviemakers what J.D. Salinger was to authors - someone whose non-prolificity supposedly cements their status as a genius, to the point that whenever a new work appears, it's supposed to be a Masterpiece-On-Arrival. Previously, Malick's only two movies were 1973's Badlands and 1978's Days Of Heaven, which gave him the status of being the only American movie director whose similar non-productivity the late Stanley Kubrick must've been deeply envious of. Only whereas Kubrick maddeningly shaped his later movies in obsessively stark and direct and unwavering perspectives, Malick has taken to be the aesthetically amorphous and elliptical poet of American movies; his movies are not so much traditionally structured three-act stories as they are visual tone poems.
An extraordinary A-level Hollywood cast was assembled for Malick's first movie in twenty years: Nolte, Penn, Cusack, Harrelson, Travolta, with supporting work from Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin, John C. Reilly, even a cameo by George Clooney; and although the majority of Adrian Brody's role was famously left on the cutting room floor, he can still be spotted hanging around the periphery. This was also Jim Caviezel's big-screen debut, already playing a Jesus-like figure well before he grew out the beard and carried the Cross in The Passion of the Christ.
Malick has everything at his disposal: a stellar cast, immaculate production design and magnificent, almost-too-exquisite cinematography by John Toll. So why, with so much going for it, is it such a profoundly unsatisfying experience? Of course, the fault lies entirely with Malick's direction and screenplay (or rather, what passes for a screenplay). The problems lie far beyond the (much-derided) pompous and insufferable multi-perspective narration, so incomprehensibly hokey in its quasi-`folksiness' that it makes Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath come off as positively Shakespearean in comparison; the cornball new-agey platitudes that we hear the soldiers `think' ala mind-screen on the soundtrack (as in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire) sound like they came right off the notebook pages of a lofty-minded and distracted third-grader in an elementary-school creative writing class.
Catching fleeting, 'poetic' visual epiphanies is Malick's stock-in-trade, what he's clearly most interested in about the filmmaking process and what he excels at - such as when the soldiers first arrive at the island and are walking through the woods fully armed, and an elderly bush-man appears out of nowhere, and walks right past them without saying a word. Only Malick would have the inspired audacity to cut to a jaw-dropping closeup of a fatally wounded baby bird struggling in the dirt right in the middle of a momentous battle sequence, but he makes his basic (if overly simple) point: human war is an invasion of Nature's tranquility. Moments like these are amazing to behold and leave you a little giddy; but that's all they're allowed to be - moments. Not much coheres into anything remotely resembling an actual story, and you can bet that's just as Malick wanted it.
Malick revels in staging the combat of war in immaculately framed and choreographed compositions, but the drawback to this approach is that the audience is always aware of the 'artistically-inclined' guiding hand of the director (as opposed to the far more effective battle scenes in, say, Oliver Stone's Platoon, where Stone chucked any desire for fancy, elaborate cinematic compositions out the window and let his cameras come absolutely unhinged in depicting the totally chaotic, 360-degree savagery of war). There is something vaguely distasteful in the way that Malick stages his battle sequences, with long 'dramatic' silences giving way to sudden crescendos (tsunamis) of violence and explosions, with his camera tracking hundreds of feet along the ground alongside the soldiers in the heat of combat in overly "bravura" stylistic cinematic flourishes. The final assault on the Japanese bunker at the top of the hill that the movie has been marching towards for an hour is as meticulously choreographed and edited as a hyper-real John Woo shoot-`em-up; you can almost hear the teenage fanboys in the audience yelling, "Awesome!" "Cool!" "Kick ass!" We never lose ourselves as an audience in believing that a war is actually taking place; we are always completely aware of Malick the God-Like Conductor of Cinema summoning forth violence and hellfire with his cinematic baton, and that overly intentional aesthetic distancing is fatal to the movie's effect. More often than not, you get the feeling that you're watching a Method-Actors' workshop in full costume at a faux-military paintball course.
With a cast this impressive, some of the performances are bound to be superlative, and Nick Nolte and Elias Koteas have the best exchanges. As the insensitive, boorish, brazenly opportunistic Lietenant Tall, Nolte's underrated performance ranks with George C. Scott's in Patton and Robert Duvall's in Apocalypse Now of immoral, unchecked American machismo in the theatre of war. Koteas' Captain Staros is the yin to Nolte's yang, a humanitarian pacifist willing to disobey the direct orders of his superiors in order to save his men's lives. Both performances are career-bests and deserved Oscar nominations. Ben Chaplin also does fine work as Private Bell, a soldier who vests his moment-to-moment fortitude in the thought of returning home to his wife; his later discovery (through written letters) that she has left him for another military man is one of the film's few (unintentionally?) comic moments.
Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is given scant material to work with. As the one closest resembling a lead character in this ensemble piece, Jim Caviezel's Private Witt never moves beyond his doe-eyed, at-one-with-nature transcendental-satyr paradigm; in the unmerciful heart of war, he never discovers any hidden valleys of rage or grief or despair; he's too busy stroking the ferns and marveling at the wild wombats and koalas that seem to surround him wherever he goes. (He might be the military variation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Little Prince, or the younger brother of Willem Dafoe's crucifix-posing Sgt. Elias in Stone's Platoon.) Sean Penn, whose courageous performance in Brian De Palma's criminally underrated Casualties of War cut right to the most horrifyingly inhuman physical and psychological aspects of war, is given the standard old world-weary, hard-boiled, seen-it-all soldier part to play here. Penn, the incomparably gifted actor's actor who delights in discovering new surprises in all in his characters, is here denied the opportunity to find any. We never buy Travolta's General (with a maitre-d's pencil mustache?) for a second; and when other A-list performers like Cusack, Harrelson and Clooney appear out of nowhere, it's more of a distraction that rips away at the constantly slipping sense of authenticity. Malick also seems to take a special glee in spending inordinate time with the character actor John Savage, who seems to have been directed to over-act in the most "look-at-me-aren't-I-crazy-aren't-I-friggin'-nuts!?"" method possible. Watching Savage pouring soil out of his hands and muttering, "we're dirt, we're just dirt" is the uber-redundant cinematic and artistic equivalent of picking at one's bellybutton lint, and all you can think is, *this* is what Malick waited 20 years to film!?
Part of why I responded to Malick's latest movie, the underrated The New World, and his previous movies Badlands and Days of Heaven, more positively than this movie was because Malick wasn't afraid of spending time in the presence of female characters (Q'Orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas, Sissy Spacek's Holly, Brooke Adam's Abby, respectively) and taking more than a passing interest in their points of view. Throughout The Thin Red Line, Malick cuts to dream-like images of the women in the soldiers' lives, i.e., the women "back home" - a mother, a sister, a daughter, and most often Private Bell's (ex) wife - but his directing of these scenes are so schematically staged and visually corny (a lady swinging on a swingset in particular is photographed like an ad for a feminine hygiene product) that they fall somewhere between embarrassingly amateurish and laughably pretentious. (Ingmar Bergman himself might blush.)
As far as Malick's supposedly benevolent, god-like perspective on the senseless destruction and waste caused by humanity down here on the planet Earth, I found it consistently, profoundly and offensively hypocritical how genuinely jingoistic and pro-American this movie is. There is NEVER a single moment in this 2 hour movie when the Japanese soldiers are seen as anything besides "the Other." We see them, each and every one skinny and malnourished, manning their armaments, fleeing from the relentless American assault, beaten, ragged, crying, praying, mourning their dead, going insane from the horrors of war. But we never meet a single Japanese character with any genuine sense of masculine assertiveness, or willingness to attempt to reach out and communicate with any of the American soldiers, or share a laugh, or a smoke. Compared to the ideologically super-righteous mega-overdose of macho Yankee testosterone on display here, couldn't Malick have presented at least one single self-respecting Toshiro Mifune or Chow Yun-Fat to stand up straight, hold his own, to speak up for his men and his homeland, to proudly represent Japanese identity in return?
There is also a moment right after the final assault on the Japanese hilltop bunker that is deeply disturbing: an infuriated, hot-tempered American soldier beats up two Japanese prisoners-of-war, and shoots one of them point-blank in the chest in cold blood, and is dragged off the Japanese corpse by another American, all under the blank, unprotesting gaze of Ben Chaplin's traumatized Private Bell. The basic implication is that war turns men into dogs, but Malick can't be bothered to spare even a second of grief over the murdered Japanese - the resulting impression seems to be that the director sides with the American soldier's just needing to "cool off," and that, hey, terrible things are bound to happen in wartime, but why should we Americans bother dwelling on it?
The very best war movies - and the only truly moral war movies - make you hate war, neither of which Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now or The Thin Red Line succeed at doing in any lasting sense of the movie-viewing experience. Rather, these are movies that DIG war - they dig the vibe, man. For all its pseudo-meditating on the eternally heart-wrenching chasm between violence and peace on earth, it's excruciatingly obvious watching all the gloriously executed tracking shots and sweeping, painterly vistas of scorched earth in The Thin Red Line that for Malick, like Coppola before him, war is an aesthetic turn-on. If Coppola was scared of being the only movie director out there caught in the act of making a spectacularly pretentious, pulpy, overly-simple-minded movie treatise on war with his bloated, shallow, comic-booky and fundamentally-wrong-headed Apocalypse Now, he needn't worry any longer - sans the druggy Jim Morrison vibes, Terrence Malick has matched his cinematic and moral delusions of grandeur to the fullest possible extent. (In bitterly amusing and all-too-typical fashion, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences responded to this hubris by rewarding him, as they had with Coppola, with nominations for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay - honors not later bestowed upon Malick's vastly more enjoyable and culturally-empathetic The New World. One wonders if Malick should've waited twenty more years to release that picture, instead of just seven, in order to clean up on the nominations at award time?)
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