what it SF's opinion of this movie?

I re-watched it this weekend and I kinda have mixed impressions of it.

On the one hand it's very well shot -- impressive visually. The acting is very good. I enjoy the various performances / interpretations the actor's give their roles. The gun play is fairly realistic and the equipment / gear is well done adding to the realism (afaik -- I'm not a a WW2 uber gear nerd...)

But it is at its core an 'artsy' WW2 movie and that gets old after a while. Some of that is fine -- I realize that many intelligent men have participated in war and heavily reflected on it. But the 'dreamy' interludes eventually get to be a bit too much from a 'balance' perspective.

Overall -- i like it more than i think some people do. But I think he could have toned down the 'existential' aspect a bit and still got the point across.

IMO Nick Nolte's acting was REALLY good. He played the 'FULL speed AHEAD -- damn the cost' commander to a T.

It's streaming on Prime now if anyone is interested.

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quote:

Originally posted by Sig209:
what it SF's opinion of this movie?

Polarizing to say the least. I think it's a great litmus test for people's opinions on movies in general. I'd suggest even putting a field in every members profile whether they like the Thin Red Line or not.

Every war movie doesn't need to be the Sands of Iwo Jima or a Rambo movie. But, some people need them to be.

I think it may be the most realistic war movie there is. There is absolutely boring periods of not having anything to do but watch the details of nature and idle thought interspersed with nerve-wrecking existential horror. People get killed at random no matter what's their story or how big the name of the actor playing them is. Most are just a transient blip on soldiers' screens in the big grindmill. That may not make it a well-entertaining movie, but then neither is war.

I thought it was visually very good. I don't think the big stars (Clooney, Travolta) cast in it (marketing gimmick) added much to the end product and in the end, I thought the book was better.

The release of Saving Private Ryan five months earlier skewed many people's expectations of what a "realistic" war movie should look like, and led to disappointment and bad word of mouth.

If SPR came after or did not exist at all, opinions on this film would have been much more favorable. The box office draw would likely be the same, as it would not get as wide a release as it did, but would have done well in the art-house theaters.

quote:

Originally posted by Rawny:
The release of Saving Private Ryan five months earlier skewed many people's expectations of what a "realistic" war movie should look like, and led to disappointment and bad word of mouth.

If SPR came after or did not exist at all, opinions on this film would have been much more favorable. The box office draw would likely be the same, as it would not get as wide a release as it did, but would have done well in the art-house theaters.

Agreed on SPR arriving first. I think if TRL came out 5 months before SPR then the latter would have taken a (minor) hit from WWII movie saturation. But SPR first really hurt perception and success of TRL. I think I'd have to say this would have held for MY take on The Thin Red Line as well.

I thought it was a decent movie but a few of the actors looked like they were trying a little too hard to act, not looking natural.
The technical photography was very good.
I would compare it more to The Pacific because of where it happened.
The Spielberg & Hanks movie and the two series set the standard now and very few can compare favorably to those.

The Thin Red Line was a novel by James Jones, WW2 veteran of Guadalcanal and Solomon Islands. Originally published about 1960 or so. His other works included From Here to Eternity (leading up to the attack on Pearly Harbor), and Whistle (a story about Pacific theater infantrymen evacuated for medical treatment, then redeployed for the European Theater in the final days of WW2, actually published after the author's death with final chapters presented in outline form).

Powerful stuff, straight from the gut of a guy who was there. Not a great writer (actually, marginally literate in any classical sense), but clearly transmitting all the trauma and emotion.

Well worth reading. Should be available at most public libraries, and paperbacks found in many used book stores.

Jones himself proved to be a pretty raunchy character. Mooched off of several wealthy patrons for a couple of decades while "mastering his art" as an author, multiple scandalous affairs, major legal (and physical) fights with producers and directors of films based on his first work (From Here to Eternity), alcoholic, suspected drug user, notorious in just about every aspect of his life.

As usual, the movies convey only as much as the director chooses. The original books are the real meat and potatoes.

Without getting into details, I believe it would never get into any War Movies list. Good or bad.

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I saw it once and wanted to like it. It's one of the few movies I don't remember much about. Maybe I need to re-watch it now that I'm older. I was in my 20's when it came out.

Tony.

If you're a 'war movie' aficionado, TRL is one of the top-tier movies made. Most people are familiar with or, only concerned with 'the action', TRL focuses on the individual; how these American's are in a land completely foreign to where they've come from, battling an enemy they're barely familiar with other than the destruction they've wrought. I think it's one of the best movies to convey the emotional toll of war without exposition.

I like it.

Great cinematography as has been mentioned.

The script is very atypical for a war movie, but thats not a bad thing - absolutely no stereotypes, except for maybe Nick Nolte's colonel. Terrance Malick movies always tend to be sort of lyrical, so it took me a couple of watchings to really appreciate the movie. The internal monologues are very revealing - corsairs comment above about the emotional toll of war is spot on...you see it's effect rather than just hearing about it.

It has an amazing cast, and the characterizations are great (although the one I really dont like is John Travolta in his role).

The pace of the movie kind of reminds me of David Lean's war epics (Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia).

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Originally posted by Jimbo Jones:



...(although the one I really dont like is John Travolta in his role).

i agree on that one. although in hindsight maybe that was who he was TRYING to portray -- the sorta 'weasly' senior officer who was all talk and no real ability / credibility...

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I love this movie. I don't see it so much as a war movie, but more of a meditation, or series of meditations, on man, nature, and man's destructiveness. Like much of what Terrence Malick does, it's beautifully shot, but it can be hard to follow at times.

It is a wonderful movie. And it is typical of many Malick movies (if there is a typical Malick movie) in that it is a reflection or a consideration of man in whatever situation the movie is about, and less about the thing itself. That seems a bit of a contradiction, but watch the movie, and I think it bears out.

The movie is undeniably beautiful, even when horrific.

If you expected a John Wayne movie or even Saving Private Ryan, it is not that. It is not only an action movie. Saving Private Ryan is also very good, but it isn't a lot more than an action movie, with a little gloss of remembrance and history. Saving Private Ryan is one of the best of its genre, and so is Thin Red Line, but they are very different movies.