The Thin Red Line
By Kit Macdonald
"I killed a man … the worst thing you can do and nobody can touch me for it."
An astonishingly strong ensemble cast including Sean Penn, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, Jim Caviezel, John C. Reilly, Nick Nolte and Adrien Brody shines in Terrence Malik's poetic and thoughtful examination of the Battle of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during the Second World War. This is a war film that's less about action and more about what's going on in the soldiers' heads: Malick interweaves the perspectives of many different soldiers, relying on their internal monologues and reflections, as they deal with the unique mixture of banality and horror that comprises most soldiers' experiences of war.
The Thin Red Line was Malick's return to filmmaking 20 years after the release of Days Of Heaven. Reportedly, the first assembled cut took seven months to edit and ran five hours, and you can imagine there were times during that process when Malick wished he hadn't bothered. But with an eventual seven Academy Award nominations and blanket critical adulation for the completed work, we should all be glad that he did.