Perhaps more than any other living filmmaker (only David Lynch comes to mind as competition), Malick’s work functions as a labyrinthine web of visual triggers shots and sequences serve as the words and sentences of his ravishing visual essays, which in turn are loaded with tangents, suggesting a perpetual longing for an elusive, intangible truth. For a film with so broad a reach of subject matter and character, a running time just short of three hours seems almost compact when you step away from the sheer force of Malick’s emotional avalanche (a six-hour rough cut is rumored to exist), a tsunami-like torrent equal parts heartbreaking and healing.
Through image, sound, and words, Malick’s third feature (his first in 20 years after the groundbreaking one-two punch of 1973’s Badlands and 1978’s Days of Heaven) fuses a complex spiritual inquiry to its narrative arc, the resulting thematic/dramatic path among the most fully realized philosophical contributions yet afforded by the cinema.Īmong 1998’s WWII offerings, Steven Spielberg’s more widely seen Saving Private Ryan enjoyed the greater initial praise, but in terms of pure artistry, The Thin Red Line continues to dwarf all but a handful of other war films, including Spielberg’s overrated epic. “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” So goes Jim Caviezel’s opening pontification, speaking of cycles of life and death, but so too is the torch of thought passed from character on to character for the course of the film, encompassing what feels like a complete rainbow of life paths.
Can any war film rival the dual spiritual uplift and ethereal horror of The Thin Red Line? Adapted from the novel of the same name by WWII veteran James Jones and itself based on his own wartime experiences at the Battle of Guadalcanal, Terrence Malick’s 1998 epic is many things: a tone poem, an action film, a philosophical statement, a religiously attuned wartime rumination on the very fabric of existence.
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