Movie Review

The young man with the blonde ponytail who swept out the theater should be a film critic. "What did you think of it?" he asked me. "Well, it's different," I said. "Yeah, people think they're going to see Saving Private Ryan in the South Seas, and they don't know what to make of it. Some walk out. Did you like it?"	1
"Yes," I said, "and against my better judgment. I don't think being a military historian has much to do with assessing this movie, which was not the case with Saving Private Ryan. Yes, I liked it very much."	2
As he demonstrated in his two film noir classics, Badlands and Days of Heaven, Terence Malick, the director of The Thin Red Line, like John Sayles and Robert Altman, knows how to take American historical subjects and settings and turn them into dark musings about the very nature of the human condition, in Malick's case linking the infinite mystery of life and death with the rhythms of nature. One could call his work intellectually derivative, an uneasy mix of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Well, those ingredients certainly beat other New Age pottages. To be derivative, calling The Thin Red Line a war movie is like calling Moby Dick a book about fishing.	3
As a screenwriter and director, Malick is casual about the history of the battle of Guadalcanal (August 1942-February 1943). A corporal in a rifle company of the Second Battalion, Twenty-seventh Infantry, Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, James Jones also took license in his novel (the basis for the movie) with his regiment's assault on the Galloping Horse, a hill mass on Guadalcanal's northwestern coastline, on January 11-13, 1943. The Twenty-fifth Division (commanded by future army chief of staff, Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins) had the mission of breaking the Japanese defenses along the Matanikau River, west of the American enclave in the Henderson Field-Lunga River region. As Collins and the Fourteenth Corps commander, Maj. Gen. Alexander M. "Sandy" Patch, predicted, the Japanese Seventeenth Army had reached the breaking point, and an American victory would send the Japanese reeling toward disintegration and death from disease and starvation in the jungle. Jones's regiment, stationed on Oahu for years, might have been part of the regular United States Army, but it entered its first battle at the Galloping Horse in the third battle of the Matanikau River.	4
Corporal Jones, thinly disguised as the philosophical Private Witt and the cautious Corporal Fife of the novel and movie, found war on a tropical island in the Solomon Islands disconcerting. Years later in his partial memoir, WWII, Jones admitted he fell under the spell of the South Pacific: "God help me, it was beautiful!" Malick takes Jones/Witt through an idyllic absence without leave (AWOL) in a Melanesian village, where he marvels at the beauty of the natives' simple world and life. Later in the movie, he notices communal strife, evidence of cannibalism, cruelty, disease, and ignorance in the same village, which suggests what a little bit of combat will do to one's perceptions. Malick and the director of cinematography John Toll know how to catch mood and meaning with light, darkness, color, and close-ups, just as Stephen Crane used verbal color as a psychological key in The Red Badge of Courage. The ruminations about nature and the impotency of human fear and rage punctuate the soldiers' dialogue, and the voice-overs and flashbacks add depth to the human drama. The movie flirts with allegory but evades the excesses of Apocalypse Now. Nevertheless, the viewer is well advised not to check his brain and imagination at the box office.	. . .