Film red line12/29/2023 Surprised to encounter no initial resistance on the lush green island, the Americans are forced to pursue the Japanese up toward their dug-in positions in the hills, resulting in some fierce action, loads of casualties and a resulting refusal by Staros to obey what he views as Tall’s suicidal order to take one hill by frontal assault. Gaff (John Cusack), whose intelligent resourcefulness will prove no more or less useful in battle than the animal instincts of Pfc. Bell ( Ben Chaplin), who is fixated on the wife he left back home and Capt. Staros ( Elias Koteas), a thoughtful lawyer and commander of Charlie Company whose desire to protect his men puts him at odds with Tall Pvt. Tall (Nick Nolte), an aging lifer with the opportunity to finally lead a battalion in battle Capt. The troop ship is loaded with other soldiers very anxious about what awaits them on the island: Lt. Welsh (Sean Penn), the cynical every-man-for-himself leader of Charlie Company, an Army infantry outfit being sent to replace Marines in the invasion of Japanese-held Guadal-canal. Witt (Jim Caviezel), one of the AWOL soldiers, who will always idealize his privileged moments among the friendly island natives even during the peak of battle, and First Sgt. The first characters to come to the fore in Malick’s significantly splintered tale are Pvt. Things like the Garden of Eden, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” mankind as a collective embodiment of the two extremes of nature, and other lofty but hardly obscure notions. Army soldier AWOL with a buddy on an idyllic tropical island, it is clear that Malick has things on his mind other than the specifics of what it took to turn the tide of the war in the Pacific. However, from the opening shot of a giant crocodile sliding into the muck through a 10-minute prologue devoted to the ruminations of a U.S. WWII buffs and fans of the James Jones novel on which the film is based may be brought up short by the lack of political, strategic and military nuts and bolts vis-a-vis the battle of Guadalcanal, while even the Malick faithful will have to remember that the director’s forte was always for fabulous visuals and haunting moods rather than for coherent storytelling. Modern audiences will initially be interested in how it stacks up against the year’s previous World War II epic, “Saving Private Ryan,” and while Malick does deliver a fair amount of bloody action, including one very intense sequence involving the taking of a hilltop bunker, the film’s intentions could not be more diverse the new picture’s counterpart to “Ryan’s” stunning opening act is an armed beach landing in which not a shot is even fired. Part of the problem with “The Thin Red Line” lies with expectations. The fact that few, if any, filmmakers this side of Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira have ever resurfaced after such a long layoff was hardly encouraging, but Malick has made it back with a picture that bears many of his trademark touches, as well as a scope far beyond anything he’s done before. Malick’s previous features, “Badlands” (1973) and “Days of Heaven” (1978), were never more than cult hits, but they were sufficiently distinctive and memorable for the reclusive writer-director to parlay them into legendary status for himself during his two decades of Garboesque silence. The film under review is the final release version, for which the sans-end-credits picture portion runs three minutes shorter than the unfinished cut screened for critics in L.A.
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