The Thin Red Line (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

This film had the unfortunate luck to be released conterminous with Saving Private Ryan. Like Wyatt Earp and Tombstone in 1993, both films have their followers and detractors. Yet I liked both Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. I'll never forget how The Thin Red Line affected me when I saw it in 1999. I rated it a 9.0 out of 10 and this Criterion collection only reinforced how I felt after finally seeing the film for the first time in a decade and a half. The film is visually stunning and truly grabs the viewer's attention. It showed how the interpersonal relationships that each character has with himself, nature and his comrades in arms. Malick held back on the gore. He very well could have shown more blood and guts had he chosen to do so. The film was rated R, after all. In a sense he sold the film short because the violence showcased could have been shown on network television. Only the language would have had to be culled. There was no sex and the violence was nowhere near gratuitous. In order to review this movie I decided to reread Michel Chion's BFI Classics book The Thin Red Line and I saw on Youtube Siskel & Ebert's discussion and I read Roger Ebert's written review from 1998. Gene Siskel felt this was the best contemporary war movie he ever saw. Ebert, while enamored with the movie did not go that far. I too would agree with Ebert. I consider this movie to be the equal of Saving Private Ryan but at the same time I highly enjoyed The Thin red Line despite its minor flaws. Jeff Owenby in his Youtube response said: "There were far too many actors[Characters], and the constant switching of big names without enough storylines to accommodate them hurt the movie." This sums up the main problem with the movie. Even Roger Ebert said this. "The soldiers are not well-developed as individual characters. Covered in grime and blood they look much alike and we strain to hear their names barked out mostly in one syllable (Welsh, Fife, Tall, Witt Gaff, Bosche, Bell Keck, Staros)." As a result of this we the viewer have problems seeing who is who. This creates a detachment from the characters and (Unlike In saving Private Ryan) prevents us from empathizing with the characters (Save For Witt). This is the reason why so many people have not given this movie its just due. Another problem as Roger Ebert mused (I Agree) saw it was that all of the characters seemed to mull and ponder their fates in the same voice. The voice of a much older person. In a nutshell, they were 20-year old kids acting 20-years older than they were. With the exception of Lt. Colonel Tall and Sgt. Welsh, the characters are too young to even be contemplating anything more than trying to survive their tour on Guadalcanal. I also had questions. What happened to Sgt. McCron, the man who comes unhinged at the loss of his squad? Did he survive? was he given a Section 8? Did Dale regain his humanity after crying in the rain? Did Doll return the .45 pistol he stole? Did Lt. Tall get his promotion? He certainly deserved it. A man his age should at least have been a full Colonel, if not a Brigadier General (Like Travolta's Character Was). The movie refrains from giving us any details as to the fates of the men after they depart the island. Michel Chion writes about this eloquently in his book. He goes into great details of each character's "inner voice." Yet he, unlike Ebert, does not seem to realize that the musings of the men sound like that of the director, an older man. But their musings do not tell us their eventual fate nor do they foreshadow what would become of them in the future. Roger Ebert also said on his show how the narration sounded a bit too much like the Days of Heaven narration, which distracted him when he saw The Thin Red Line. Simply put, the movies seem to have the same voice which is unrealistic. It seemed like he took the tone of the narration and moved it from the Texas wheat fields to this island in the Pacific and yet he's asking the same questions. As I mentioned earlier, this same "voice" does not give the characters any individuality. It only serves to make them what seem to be clones. This was not the case with the book by James Jones. Each character was delineated precisely and Ebert even says that had Spielberg done this movie it might have looked much more like Saving Private Ryan. The battle scenes were nothing but superb! Taking Hill 210 must have been like taking Hamburger Hill, a pure hell for anyone attempting to ascend it's hellish terrain. This is where the movie grabbed and held me. The vivid scenery, the musings of the soldiers as well as the individual shots of wounded and angry wildlife. A captured crocodile, a wounded bird and a maddened snake (According To Wikipedia there Are Few Venomous Snakes On Guadalcanal). I highly recommend this movie and I'm proud to have been the 535th person to rate it Five Stars and the 1067th overall. I also recommend you purchase Michel Chion's book. He was able to translate the words of the Japanese soldiers that surrounded Witt at the end of the movie! I'd always wondered what they were saying to him. I was fascinated when I read what they were saying. I'm still glad that Malick chose not to subtitle those words because it kept us in Witt's point of view and kept us from identifying too much with the "enemy" as shown in this movie. Chion's book is the perfect companion piece to this movie. See also the Siskel & Ebert segment for this film (And Any Others From Their Time Period Together). I also recommend reading Roger Ebert's original January 8, 1999 review of the movie. All of his reviews are timeless. He and Gene Siskel will always be missed. A. Nathaniel Wallace, Jr. A. Nathaniel Wallace, Jr.

This is one awesome WWII film, focusing on the Guadalcanal mission in the Pacific. At 3 hours, it may seem long, but between the film's physical action and philosophical reflections, those hours fly by—I was sorry when it was all over. There is a roster of known Hollywood actors in here: Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, Ben Chaplin, Elias Koteas, Woody Harrelson, Jared Leto, John Savage, John C. Reilly, Tim Blake Nelson, John Travolta, George Clooney and even more. Some have main roles, such as Nolte, Penn, Caveizel, Koteas, Chaplin; others are more like cameos, such as Travolta, Nelson, Reilly, Clooney. Outstanding to me was Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ." (Which reminds me: Gibson also has a cameo in Mallick's film.) His character, Private Witt, sets the philosophical tone of the film from the very start. He has gone AWOL with a comrade, hiding on a Pacific island whose tribal people may encounter natural dangers like crocodiles and monsoons, but nonetheless appear happy with their lives and at peace with the world: they don't have much to be fearful of losing, except one another. Witt's contemplations about this reality, death, immortality, and the human condition are soon interrupted by a military troop ship, ready to apprehend the runaways. Private Witt is forced to leave—and as punishment, assigned to a stretcher bearer's job in a dangerous campaign—but his musings go with him, informed not only by what he has learned in observing the island people, but by memories of his past. This philosophical dimension is sustained not only by Witt but other characters too, and is integral to the experience of The Thin Red Line without ever interrupting the film's tense, frightful drama. The U.S. military seeks to wrest command of Guadalcanal (a Solomon island) from the Japanese, in the army's first major amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater. (It would end up a 6-month hellish campaign.) Essential to the army's advancement was a high ridge that allowed a powerful vantage-point of the terrain. Once it is discovered, the monumental mission for a select few in Witt's new unit is to take the ridge from the Japanese, who are dug in and well supplied to defend their holding. Every bit of action leading to the discovery of the ridge and then involving the battle for the ridge is hair-raising. I don't think I've ever tensed up so much and been so chilled by a war movie's action scenes before, and I've seen a lot of war movies. There is much to experience in The Thin Red Line, and much to contemplate. Along with those heights and depths, there is also the sheer beauty of the film's cinematography. If you've seen any of Mallick's movies before, such as Days of Heaven or The New World, you know that beauty can be outstanding, and I doubt you'll be disappointed in the cinematography here. It is powerful, and makes the film especially memorable.

I already loved the film, so waited so patiently for Criterion to come out, as it simply HAD to come out, with a definitive edition. I read and posted on the various fora, sent the emails, re-tweeted the enigmatic and happy Twitpic that Criterion posted, jumped all over the Criterion newsletter when they came out with their gnomic icon confirmation. I got the Blu-Ray the day it dropped, and have spent the subsequent couple days in a kind of reverie. I just watched the film -- which is, full stop for effect, absolutely STUNNING in Blu-Ray. Every technical aspect, from the color to the surround-sound (I so love the use of Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question" in the middle of a battlefield atrocity), is reference-quality AWESOME. I've yet to experience the commentary, but I've watched the insightful feature on James Jones and the novel from his daughter and listened to the chants; there's still the 15 deleted scenes and the wartime newsreels on Guadalcanal to go through, plus some other extras I'm sure. The essay is wonderful. If you think you experienced a religious ecstasy the first time you saw The Thin Red Line, just experience it again on this Criterion Blu-Ray and undergo true cinematic rapture. ** UPDATE ** I've watched all of the extra features, which are uniformly insightful and superb. Commentary: This is by cinematographer John Toll, production designer Jack Fisk, and producer Grant Hill. Criterion commentaries are usually of three breeds, I find: hit-or-miss commentaries by film scholars (Peter Cowie's Bergman commentaries would be hits, the dull "you see the door in that shot? that door represents an opening" commentary on Solaris would be a miss), idiosyncratic commentaries by directors (Edward Yang, Jim Jarmusch), and then incredibly detailed production commentaries by people who worked on the production (The Last Metro, both Malicks). I like the director commentaries the most, since they usually combine both interpretation and production stories. The Thin Red Line commentary is completely about the production of the film, suffused with an almost worshipful regard for Terrence Malick. I found it a little dry. I would've liked discussion about, say, the poetry of the film -- the beautiful scene of Witt's mother dying, for example, which is like a Renaissance painting. Instead you hear that that scene was one of the last ones filmed. Actors: An almost 30 minute featurette, featuring interviews with Sean Penn, Kirk Acevedo, Thomas Jane, Elias Koteas, Dash Mihok and Jim Cavaziel. I didn't find this particularly interesting; the actors uniformly fawn over Malick's genius and basically congratulate themselves for participating in the film. Casting: A twenty minute featurette with the casting director, Diane Crittenden, featuring many audition tapes. Pretty interesting to see now well-known actors audition in the beginning of their careers (Nick Stahl, especially). Thomas Jane was quite the rockabilly. Music: Hans Zimmer talks about his ambitious (he calls it "pretentious") ideas for the soundtrack of the film, particularly the idea that the music "should keep asking questions." I didn't realize that Zimmer had done the thoughtful music for Thin Red Line: it's so different from the sonic bombasts he's been doing lately. Editing: Malick's team of editors, Billy Weber, Leslie Jones and Saar Klein discuss their work on their film. I found this feature to be the most interesting of the lot, particularly their discussion of how Malick pared the original 5-hour cut of the film (which, according to them, was plot-heavy, expository and filled with dialogue) into its current form, which is essentially a silent film layered with voiceover. Apparently Malick watched the assemblies with the soundtrack out, listening instead to Green Day. Who knew Terrence Malick liked Green Day? Deleted Scenes: These fourteen minutes of deleted scenes show what a different movie The Thin Red Line could have been: they're basically straightforward dialogue and action scenes, with little or no voiceover or music. One of the events that actually happened to James Jones that he put into the novel -- he was surprised by an enemy soldier while taking a crap, and managed to kill him -- turns out to have been filmed after all. Another scene shows George Clooney displaying some fine actorly chops. Kaylie Jones: James Jones' daughter talks about her father and the writing of The Thin Red Line in an illuminating featurette. Newsreels: Ten 2-minute newsreels from 1942 talk about the American involvement in the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal in an incredibly gung-ho, Celebrate Our Boys fashion. It's an amazing counterpoint to the film. Melanesian chants: Audio-only feature on the native chants used in the film. Trailer: Watch this after you've seen the film, since like most trailers it completely gives everything away.

Great show!

When my Mother passed away, it was a shock, and I was very confused and frightened. I had no idea how to handle it or how I was even supposed to feel. I had a lot of sadness, and I didn't know what to do with any of it. The first time I ever saw The Thin Red Line was one week after I lost my Mother. The Thin Red Line is a war film, but it is an art film above all else. The Thin Red Line is 'a thought-provoking mediation on man, nature, and violence'. I had no idea what I was in for. One of the very first pieces of dialogue is spoken by a character named Pvt. Witt. He says, "I remember my mother when she was dying, she was all shrunk up and grey. I asked her if she was afraid, she shook her head no. I was afraid to touch the death I seen in her. I couldn't find nothing beautiful or uplifting about her going back to God. I wondered what it'd be like when I died, to know that this was the last breath you was ever going to draw. I just hoped I could meet it with the same calm she did. Cause that's where it's hidden. The immortality I hadn't seen." The emotional toll this film would put me through would be immense, something I have never felt before or will ever feel again. The Thin Red Line spoke to me in a way a piece of art has never spoken to me before. Jim Caviezel, the actor who played Pvt. Witt, delivered a performance and created a character that changed my life. I have never identified closer with a film character before. 'Identified' isn't even the right word for it, an out-of-body experience is more accurate. It was unreal. The film had an almost therapeutic effect on me, without me even knowing it, I was sorting myself out. I was getting better. The film itself is pure poetry, the film is brilliant. Terrence Malick's best. The ensemble cast the films boasts redefines the term 'star studded'. Jim Caviezel, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, John Travolta, George Clooney, John Cusack, Jared Leto, Nick Stahl, Adrien Brody, John C. Rielly, Woody Harrelson, and Sean Penn are only but a handful of the wonderful actors you will find in this film. The film displays the best use of voice-overs that I have ever seen. The Thin Red Line is a one-of-a-kind picture, and one that you must open yourself up to completely. Malick is a master of film, and The Thin Red Line is the strongest evidence to support that claim. The Thin Red Line will change the way you think about and view films. It will open your eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. That world is Malick's vision. I am still in awe. What The Thin Red Line did for me is almost hard to completely grasp. It didn't make everything better, it is my girlfriend and my family who helped me finally heal. The Thin Red Line put me on the road to recovery, and that in and of itself is a wholly remarkable thing for a film to do for a person. The Thin Red Line changed me forever. This is a film that wants to speak to to you. Listen.

1)Malick is a great director.I've seen all of his movies.My favorite Malick film is New world followed by The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven and last but not least Badlands. 2)The Criterion Thin Red Line was worth the wait.The Blue Ray version is awesome. 3)Do not expect a Private Ryan or Halls of Montezuma,this is a Malick flick,which means your gonna have to think a bit and get philosophical,because you are going to be bombarded by exquisite cinematic imagery,and characterizations that relay a unrealized, not so specific,gray area,point of view on war,men in war,and nature in war.Malick is not going to spell everything out for you,that's the whole deal with Malick,there's a strangness about his films that is captivating,and sublime. 4)I could have done without the cameos butthe acting is great. 5)I wish the Criterion edition would have added sme of the footage missing from Malick's original 6 hr version.My nephew saw the 6hr version,and said it was much better than the 170 minute chopped up theatrical version.I know many say the 170 minute version of TTRL is too long,but I,(as in all of Malicks films)see each frame visually poetic,and stylistic,they come together and the movie plays out with artistic abandon,purposely surreal,TTRL leaves you asking questions rather pushing you toward a specific sonclusion. 6)I have read some pretty negative reviews on TTRL,by amazon movie watchers,and when I first saw TTRL I was not that impressed with Malick's ww2 vision,but the more I watched it the better it got,today I really like this film.The Criterion version makes it even better.Malick is not presumptuous enough to question why there is war,or why men can kill other men rather he gives us an island somewhere in an emerald sea,with a native people,life bearing nature,2 armies of armed and commanded soldiers,all making war and death on each other,and all we can do is watch. 7)I wish Criterion would do ONE EYED JACKS--there is not a decent version (DVD)of Brando's great western anywhere to be had...

Andrew Marton's The Thin Red Line in 1964 focused on 1st Sgt Welsh and PFC Don Doll. Prewitt never entered the story. This is in contrast to the novel, in which Prewitt was one of the main characters. I guess he never appeared in Marton's version because Prewitt was a deserter and Marton needed to get DOD support. So, in that respect, Terrence Malik's version is much more truer to the novel than Marton's Marton's version is similar to Terrance Malik's version of the conflict between Capt. Staros and Lt. Col. Tall. Tall is past his retirement age and his career stalled a long time ago. Somehow, he got command of a battalion, but he is an inept leader and an even poorer tactician. He is a corrupt know nothing with a big mouth. It's probably why he was never considered for promotion. Nick Nolte does a good job in infusing life into the character, but Tall's character really was no good. A good battalion commander would have taken the situation into consideration Stavos' concerns and worked with him instead of firing him. Stavos knew what he was doing while Tall was clueless, which is why Tall fired Stavos. I also happen to like Sean Penn's portrayal of Welsh. He must have studied Burt Lancaster's portayal of the Welsh character in the film version of Jones' first novel "From Here to Eternity". Penn does and excellent job. By the way, the two disc collector's edition is really worth it!

Great movie for a great price. Criterion did a great job. Very philosophical war movie that is a must watch!