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The Thin Red Line

1998

Terrence Malick

Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas ...

7.1

67,960

War 1942, Guadalcanal. US soldiers land on the island, hoping to take it back from the Japanese. At first, they encounter no resistance. C for Charlie company ventures into the jungle, discovering the corpses of some colleagues who've gone before them. Their progress is halted and they sustain many losses when they attempt to climb a hill heavily fortified by the Japanese. Lt Colonel Tall is adamant that they must take the hill, but Captain ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Todd McCarthy Variety	"A complex, highly talented work marked by intellectual and philosophical ambitions that will captivate some critics and serious viewers."	POS
United States	Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times	"The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Mick LaSalle SFGATE	"The film's cumulative impact has everything to do with mood, so that viewers may feel impatient at times -- only to realize hours later that they've seen something extraordinary."	POS
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"'The Thin Red Line' has moments of grim oracular power, but they’re buried in a blur of grandiloquent vagueness."	NEU
United States	Michael O'Sullivan The Washington Post	"It can be called an anti-war film, but its disdain for the very conventions of the medium make it an anti-anti-war film."	POS
United States	Joe Morgenstern The Wall Street Journal	"Stunning images couldn't make Days of Heaven a coherent dramatic whole, and they can't do it for The Thin Red Line."	NEU
United States	Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times	"If it's an epic, it's an intimate, dream-time epic, an elliptical, episodic film, dependent on images and reveries, that treats war as the ultimate nightmare"	POS

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