The Thin Red Line

Buy This Item The Thin Red Line by 20th Century Fox  Available from Amazon  $9.49  on 8-31-2008     A powerful frontline cast - including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson and George Clooney - explodes into action in this hauntingly realistic view of military and moral chaos in the Pacific during World War II. Reader Reviews I rented this film with the hopes of experiencing an excellent piece of cinematography and gritty war realism. What I received was something so unrelated to this dream that it is sickening. The majority of the film is devoted to inane philosophical babbling by simple-minded southern soldiers with bad accents. Every scene is packed full of forced lines and random thoughts that have seemingly no relation to war of any type. Now, if these scenes were spaced out between the action, and had occurred after some horrendous battle, I could perhaps forgive the film. Unfortunately, they drag on for the majority of the movie. Even so, a few decent battle scenes would have made this experience passable. It is not to be. Foolish looking kids run around bunched up like cheap extras with no idea whats supposed to be going on. Generic dirt clod explosions with a few flames are the high end of special effects one can expect. For most of the first half of the film we never see the faces of the enemy. This occurs as we are spoonfed scene after scene of ridiculous poetry by "simple soldiers." I give this movie an F for being unable to impart even the simplest notion of what it is to be a soldier. Dramatic deaths are often comical and unbelievably verbose. Specifically, a rather loud mouthed and seemingly mentally disabled soldier accidently pulls the pin out of a grenade in his belt. He stands and looks at the pin, runs into the side of a hill - and then the grenade go off on his belt. Does he explode? No, there is a small pop, and it looks like he has somehow miraculously escaped harm. The slow and overdone death scene that follows quickly disabuses us of this notion. On the note of historical realism, Guadalcanal was a hardfought and bitter series of battles between the Japanese and Americans with the Japanese reinforcing and shelling American positions during the night. During the day, it was almost constant bombardment by American artillery, aircraft, and naval elements. Unfortunately, this film only succeeds in convincing me that Guadalcanal is (and remains) a tropical paradise for the entirety of the war. There is not a single scene where we experience any ambient fighting sounds. No aircraft flyovers, no machine gun chatter, no distant explosions. It seems apparent that Charlie Company and the Japanese were the only people who actually did any fighting on the island. Overall, this film is an incoherent an overly philosophical mess of a movie with poor action, nonsensible characters, and no redeeming qualities. I advise people to stay away from this movie and not waste three hours of their life on such a film.

The Thin Red Line Available from Amazon Price: $9.49 Updated on 8-31-2008.

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