C-for-Charlie Company arrives at Guadalcanal, reinforcements in a months-long assault undertaken to wrest control of the island from the Japanese. The emotional, psychological, and physical toll of combat is heavy, both for the men involved and the island itself.

CRITIQUE

The Thin Red Line is both the most peculiar and most beautiful war movie ever made. In adapting James Jones’s novel, writer-director Terrence Malick used the text as a springboard for his own obsessions, primarily that of man’s symbiotic relationship with his surroundings.

Much like every Malick movie (of which there are precious few), the plot of The Thin Red Line is secondary to mood and emotion. The combat scenes themselves--which are rather infrequent for a war movie--aren’t really all that important in and unto themselves, rarely ever serving to advance the plot in any way; what is important is the impact they have. Every living being in every frame is affected in some way by the violence, and Malick and cinematographer John Toll make every frame as lush and beautiful as possible, creating what is arguably the only successful ethereal war film. Isolate any five- or ten-minute chunk of the film and it will likely seem like a puzzling piece of nonsense, but it’s spellbinding when taken as a whole.

In my opinion, the only more successful attempt to make a philosophical point via a visual tone poem is 2001, and that happens to be my favorite work by my favorite filmmaker, so in my mind the fact that Malick was almost able to reach the same heights is astonishing.

I wasn’t too enthusiastic about this movie the first time I saw it. I bought it sight-unseen when it was first released on DVD, watched it once and then got rid of the disc. But something about it wouldn’t leave me alone, so I picked it up again when it was given a DTS-encoded re-release.

Watching it a second time proved to be a completely different experience (which is apparently not an uncommon occurrence, as the movie’s rabidly devoted fanbase has grown with each passing year). I was unfamiliar with Malick’s style the first time I watched it, so maybe my mind was clouded by expectations (or lack thereof). Saving Private Ryan (which hit theaters a mere four months before this movie) had more or less rewritten the rules on how cinematic combat was presented, and The Thin Red Line runs in a different direction. (Although it’s been compared to Ryan for the past twelve years, this movie has far more in common with Apocalypse Now and Paths of Glory.)

The two movies are equally successful in achieving their particular goals, but those goals couldn’t be more different. Ryan is a tribute to the men who endured hell on earth in an effort to halt a great wrong, while Line is an attempt to visualize the argument that war is hell on the Earth, the raping of the natural world on the grandest scale possible. That may seem like an odd notion--and this goes back to what I wrote earlier about viewing isolated bits of the movie as opposed to the whole--and when you first see a shot of a member the island’s teeming wildlife intercut with the combat or a canopy of trees riddled by bullet-holes, it’s hard not to wonder exactly what Malick is doing. But if the movie succeeds in grabbing hold of you (and it either will or it won’t; this isn’t a middle-ground movie), you become totally enveloped in Malick’s virtuoso accomplishment and come to understand his line of thinking completely.

Continuing along that line, it’s only because he can weave such a spell that Malick is able to perform a seemingly impossible feat: making an anti-war movie set during World War II. If any war seems just (and I specifically mean the efforts to bring it and its instigators to an end), it’s that one, so portraying it as an exercise in stupid, nonsensical destruction would seem an impossible task.

I suppose the only way you could do it would be the way Malick does--by setting the story in the Pacific theater (there’s no possible way you could do the same for Europe) and melding the combatants and their surroundings into a single organism. Everyone knows that firing a bullet has an indelible impact on both shooter and target, but Malick takes it one step further by arguing that the act also impacts whatever happens to be in between. (Ponder that for a second and you’ll realize that while Malick seemed like one of the last people you’d expect to make a war movie, combine the central themes of Badlands and Days of Heaven and you get this movie’s central theme.)

Then again, this isn’t really a World War II movie. Unlike Ryan, whose story couldn’t possibly translate to any other conflict, Line is a universal tale pinned to a specific event. I think the only reason Malick’s movie is set during the attempt to take Guadalcanal is because Jones’s book (which I tried to read before the dull prose and mind-numbing attention to detail bested me; it’s like The Naked and Dead rewritten by James Fennimore Cooper) is. Malick just as easily could have achieved the same effect had he opted to venture into Korea or Vietnam (which makes me wonder what he could have done with Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green).

During the ten months he spent on post-production, Malick removed entire subplots and characters from the movie. And while the movie never looks as if it were edited with a chainsaw, it’s nevertheless obvious it did exist at some point in a longer form. Watching it I get the feeling the movie would be even greater if it were thirty or forty minutes longer. There’s an off-balance feeling to bits of the movie, as if something needed to flesh out or counterpoint scenes is missing. I know I, like many others, hoped the fabled longer version would finally be unveiled when it was announced that Criterion had secured the rights for this release, and then I, like many others, was disappointed when this didn’t come to be. It’s extremely rare that I think a movie would benefit from a lengthening, but this movie is one I believe would.

Regardless, though, this is still a major achievement on Malick’s part, and when it’s all said and done could very well be his masterpiece.

THE VIDEO

The 2.35:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 50GB disc--was supervised by Malick and Toll, scanned at 4K resolution, and subjected to Criterion’s exacting standards. The result is, as it should be, perfect. The image is flat-out gorgeous--rich, lush, detailed, deep, and completely film-like. Given what a beautiful movie this is, I was hoping Criterion would work wonders, but even I wasn’t expecting this. This is what high-def is all about.

THE AUDIO

This movie’s sound design is as exquisite as the visuals, creating a completely immersive and natural sonic landscape for every scene, and this disc’s DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 replicates it perfectly. There are layers upon layers of information built into the audio, which has a wonderful sense of space and distance, and the mix affords them a sense of verisimilitude: everything here sounds the way you think it would or should. And while the mix is dense, it’s never muddled; everything comes through clearly, cleanly and naturally. No other audio options are included; English SDH subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

A commentary is provided by cinematographer Jack Toll, production designer Jack Fisk, and producer Grant Hill. It’s an okay track, with short bursts of talk separated by stretches of silence and/or moments where one of the participants struggles to come up with something to say; not surprisingly, Toll’s input is by far the most interesting. (I wish editors Billy Weber [who contributed to the commentary for Criterion’s terrific Days of Heaven disc] and Leslie Jones had participated; imagine what they could have contributed.)

The following video-based extras are all presented in high-definition:

Several new interviews (95 minutes total) are also included. Participants include, but aren’t limited to, composer Hans Zimmer, editors Billy Weber and Leslie Jones, and actors Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, and Thomas Jane. There’s also an excellent segment with Kaylie Jones, James Jones’s daughter (and author of the autobiographical novel A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, which made also made into a 1998 movie).

Another interview features casting director Dianne Crittenden (18 minutes); this one is intercut with vintage audition footage.

A few outtakes (15 minutes) are also included (including one featuring a brief appearance by a recent comeback kid whose character was excised from the final cut). Watching them only reinforced my belief about a longer cut. 

A compilation of World War II newsreels (14 minutes) features footage from the Guadalcanal and Solomon Island campaigns. 

A few of the Melanesian chants that serve as a component of the film’s score are accompanied by a slideshow of production stills (7 minutes).

The final extra on the disc itself is movie’s theatrical trailer.

It wouldn’t be a Criterion release without a booklet, and here you get one containing an essay on the movie by film critic David Sterritt and a great 1963 Saturday Evening Post article by James Jones in which the author laments the lack of realism in the war movies of the day.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Thin Red Line belongs on the shortlist of the greatest examples of war cinema, taking its place alongside Apocalypse Now and Paths of Glory. (That all three are coming to Blu-ray within a span of four weeks is a dream come true.) The fine folks at Criterion have done the film complete justice with this release, which will undoubtedly be among the year’s best.