Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD EAN: 9786305438212 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC ISBN: 6305438218 Label: 20th Century Fox Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox Number Of Items: 1 Picture Format: Letterbox Publisher: 20th Century Fox Region Code: 1 Release Date: November 07, 2000 Running Time: 170 minutes Sales Rank: 75356 Studio: 20th Century Fox Theatrical Release Date: January 08, 1999
Amazon.com essential video: One of the cinema's great disappearing acts came to a close with the release of The Thin Red Line in late 1998. Terrence Malick, the cryptic recluse who withdrew from Hollywood visibility after the release of his visually enthralling masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978), returned to the director's chair after a 20-year coffee break. Malick's comeback vehicle is a fascinating choice: a wide-ranging adaptation of a World War II novel (filmed once before, in 1964) by James Jones. The battle for Guadalcanal Island gives Malick an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure philosophical noodling--or simply let the camera contemplate the first steps of a newly birthed tropical bird, the sinister skulk of a crocodile. This is not especially an actors' movie--some faces go by so quickly they barely register--but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private (newcomer Jim Caviezel). The picture's sprawl may be a result of Malick's method of 'finding' a film during shooting and editing, and in some ways The Thin Red Line seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete. Yet it casts a spell like almost nothing else of its time, and Malick's visionary images are a challenge and a signpost to the rest of his filmmaking generation. --Robert Horton
Amazon.com: This serious-minded but flawed effort at bringing James Jones's later World War II novel to the screen might have languished in film vaults had reclusive director Terence Malick not resurfaced with a newer version, the likely spur to this video release. This first attempt, lensed in 1964, offers glimpses of what may have attracted Malick to the project.
Jones's story focuses on two American soldiers during the Guadalcanal campaign, the newlywed draftee Private Doll (Keir Dullea) and Sergeant Welch (Jack Warden), the hardened veteran. Doll is determined to survive whatever the cost, disobeying orders if it will improve his chances; Welch is dutiful yet calculating, resorting to deliberate acts of madness to toughen up his troops by showing them war's own absurdity by example. The clash between the private and the sergeant thus becomes the core to the film, focusing on the 'thin red line' between sanity and insanity and depicting how that line blurs for both protagonists.
As directed by veteran Andrew Marton (55 Days in Peking), the film is at its best during sweeping battle sequences capturing the gritty horror of hand-to-hand combat, as the Americans try to take an impregnable wall of caves held by the Japanese enemy. Less successful are portentous scenes and dialogue that underscore this evident parable with a heavy hand; there's a self-conscious art film spin that misfires.The original black-and-white Cinemascope negative shows wear and tear, and early copies betray serious problems in their optical transfers. --Sam Sutherland
Digital Life Reviews
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Stink, stank, stunk
The thing that made "The Thin Red Line" a flawed war movie for me was the way some of the characters were cast and/or filmed in a way that made them undistinguishable from each other. They were supposed to be guys you could follow, but looked so similar they became a few more faces in the crowd with extra camera time.
Next, the thing they did that STUNK it up for me is...
* * * * SPOILER to follow * * * *
...the way they showed the American soldiers brutalizing the Japanese, namely the most vulnerable ones. Pulling teeth from the wounded and killing the nonthreatening guys (the Japanese soldiers surrendering or in the act of praying on their knees).
We got to see the praying guys get shot and bayonetted more than once in this film, sometimes in slow motion from the first person point of view. In TTRL's later segments, the way our guys were cutting the ... Read More
Rating: - A beautiful film
This film in my opinion is an epic combination of sight, sound, and performance. Nick Nolte's role was Oscar worthy. It is the most powerful, gutteral, desperate, portrayal of a combat commander ever filmed. There is no fluff, no contrived dialogue, only a soldier pushing for the victory that has eluded him his entire life, his generation's life. Koteas as Cpt. Starles is excellent, as are Caviezel, Cusack, Chaplin, and Penn. The philosophical meanderings and voice over take quite a bit of flack. I think one needs to be reminded that these are not fully formed men we're observing. These are 18 year old boys standing on the brink of savagery, murder, and anihilation. When they have time to ponder their situation, how would you expect them to think, how deep and meaningful is the philosophy of an 18 year old? These boys that have been thrown into the meat grinder are dealing with the horror that is confronting ... Read More
Rating: - Crossing the Line
Malik's epic anti-war treatise is less effective on repeat and its pitch at the sublime is best savoured on big-screen theatre darkness to work its magic. Much of the necessary swatches of sky through tree canopy, macro nature, and shifting light over sussurating grasses, the epiphanies experienced from the Christ-like Caviezel used to counter the violence of combat terror, is lost on small format. Initially, the film moved me. Now, and with the pretentious,'New World', added to Malik's oeuvre, I side with those who experience tedium, while holding that it is an incomparably better film. The lack of character development is essential to the director's overview; their parts clearly serve the director's philosophy. Yet there are stunning cameo roles from Nolte, Penn, and Cavizel. It is one of the few war films that delve into the individual fear and deaths of the combatants. But there's too much repetition, even given ... Read More
Rating: - So listlessly boring, I remember almost nothing
I saw this movie in theaters when it first came out. I was a child, then, 10 or 11 years old. Maybe I should have been set up to be bored, but even looking back on it now, ten years later, I find myself justified in claiming it boring.
Even as a child, I wasn't the sort easily bored by adult-type movies. I could sit through a movie like "Courage Under Fire" and be entertained. This one, however, had about two scenes of action, and the rest just people lounging around talking to themselves.
First they try a D-Day style mock-up beach landing, only there's no one firing at them from the beach, so that ends up looking awkward, whether or not it happened in real life. Then comes a charge up a hill, where there is ACTION~! Then the soldiers make it into a village, where the spend the remaining 1.5-2 hours living among the people, talking to themselves, thinking about stuff, and doing pretty ... Read More
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- Stink, stank, stunk
- A beautiful film
- Crossing the Line
