The Thin Red Line - 1998
Is there a director who more clearly calls to mind the "you either love him or hate him" designation than The Thin Red Line's own Terence Malick? Well, perhaps bringing his particular talents to the war genre brings this question into pristine focus. How does a man so obsessed with certain kinds of shots, depictions of the natural world, and the interior of the human mind make a war picture? The Thin Red Line is Malick's answer.
There are certain years in cinema where groups of films appear together for one reason or another. It can be amusing and even instructive to compare and contrast movies when this phenomenon arises. The year 1998 is one such example, for in it TWO great war films hit theatres. The two were both long, epic in nature, grand in scale, and even dealt with major battles in the same venue (WWII). Both contained enormous casts chock full of major stars and key character actors. One we've been discussing for a bit now. The other, of course, is Saving Private Ryan.
Though they do contain many noteworthy elements in common, their differences rise to the surface upon closer scrutiny. It oversimplifies matters to say that Saving Private Ryan is merely about external spectacle, but it is certainly a picture with incredible filmmaking prowess. (For more on this, read that film's review). By contrast, The Thin Red Line, like so many of Malick's works, is interior and even insular. The film's tagline was: Every man fights his own war. This is informative for several reasons.
Though the battle scene where they take the hill in Guadalcanal is in itself a technical marvel, it is not the focus of the picture, or even that scene. Where Ryan depicts bravery and heroism, TRL shows us cowardice and disobeying orders. Moreover, Malick gets at this interior nature by employing a series of voiceovers, many of which contain soldiers musing about high concept dualities. Love and war. Individuals and common humanity. The present and the absent God. These are soldiers who can obey orders, to be certain, but ones who are also searching deeply for meaning in the horror.
At the conclusion, Terence Malick is, perhaps above all, a mood-conjurer. The picture then is not even really about learning the backgrounds of these men (something SPR is EXCEPTIONAL at by the way), so much as it searches to grasp their feelings in the midst of the fight. Their fear. Their bravery. And finally, of course, their massive sense of relief when the battle is over. "War doesn't ennoble men," one character says in voiceover. "It turns them into dogs. Poisons the soul." I'm not sure a war movie has been made like this before '98 or since. It is wholly its own and worthy of adulation.
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