THE THIN RED LINE (76)

Directed by: Terrence Malick

Starring: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas

The Pitch: The battles of Guadalcanal during WW2, centring on the capture of a strategically important hill.

Theo Sez: Nothing quite like it in war-movie annals, though Huston's RED BADGE OF COURAGE is obviously an influence - the focus on inner lives, the emphasis on the muddle and randomness of battle, even details like the low-angle shot of light streaming in through tree-tops. Like that film (though it's nearly three times as long), it never quite builds to any firm statement on War - it's philosophical doodling, spinning variations on a repeated theme : structured like a symphony, it plays like "Bolero". The recurring strand is the eternal conflict between valuing others' lives and valuing only one's own, expressed through two separate contrasts, theoretical and practical respectively - Witt's all-embracing humanism ("maybe all men got one big soul") versus Walsh's blunt insistence on "making an island" of himself, then Staros' instinctive compassion versus Col. Tall's subjugation of lives to his quest for personal glory - and expressed also in the contrast between pantheistic Nature, where everything is equally a reflection of God, and the soul-poison of War, where lives must compete against each other. It is, of course, New Age hooey (nothing's more competitive, or War-like, than Nature), but you don't have to accept the symbols to appreciate the theme - especially when the parts are as dazzling as this : the central battle set-piece, with its poetic alternation of faces and landscapes, makes PRIVATE RYAN look a little silly and over-heated, and many of the scenes (the opening idyll, the stand-off between Staros and Tall, the ignoble death-by-grenade, John Cusack staring down the Colonel) are superb by any standards, with a thrilling immediacy that's new to Malick's work. "Is this darkness in You too?" asks one of the many (haunting, exasperating) voice-overs - and it's a measure of the film's richness that the line could be directed equally at God or the viewer : a high-flown symbolic drama (Witt's final sacrifice a defeat, Christ-like, of War's chief horror, the fear of Death - breaking its spell, and driving the soldiers hence from this tarnished Eden) is also a compelling, you-are-there war movie. Not wholly successful ; maybe not even mostly successful ; still among the year's best films.