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.

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.