The Thin Red Line

 We’re unlikely to see a more extraordinary Hollywood movie this year than Terrence Malick’s long-awaited return to filmmaking after two decades. Brilliant camerawork (courtesy of John Toll), superb performances from a strong cast, and manifest ambitions – The Thin Red Line is a masterpiece, a stunning piece of work from one of cinema’s true visionaries.

 

Typically for Malick, the story is simple and straightforward, charting the fortunes of a U.S. army platoon as they attempt, against all odds, to wrest control of Guadalcanal from the Japanese. Yet the film’s three hours are far from empty: thematically, philosophically and spiritually, no war movie has been so profoundly rich.

 

For it’s not just an essay on the hellish madness of war or a tribute to courage under fire, but a mythic, almost pantheist meditation on the role of conflict, violence and death in nature. With its philosophical, religious and literary allusions and its cogent central metaphor of paradise lost, it’s a genuinely epic cinepoem that essentially sidesteps history, politics and conventional ethics to deal with war as an absolute, inevitable and eternal facet of existence. Intellectually provocative yet, in its own strangely serene way, incredibly moving.