It is only a matter of diction, but it is important to note that history remembers it not as the Victory of Guadalcanal, but the Battle of Guadalcanal. Yes, in the end the Americans took this small but strategically important stronghold from the Japanese, but it would be inhumane to arbitrarily call it a victory. It was a battle of minds and a battle of souls.
Just as with war, the Thin Red Line, provides no easy answers and no moral compass to fall back on. The movie does not end with the securing of the infamous ridge (this actually happens about two thirds of the way through the movie), so it does not give the viewer an easy out or a reason to cheer. It methodically allows breathing room for some gritty post-mortem reflection and in today's Hollywood, that's as dangerous as accidentally blowing up your butt.
To call it a masterpiece might be premature, only time will tell, but this is certainly the best war movie made since 1993's Schindler's List. Director Terrence Malick comes out of relative obscurity to create a work of layers and textures, not necessarily narratives with good guys and bad guys. Yes, we identify with the men of "C" company (a nod to the term "Charlie"), but there are also scenes where we intensely identify with the petrified Japanese soldiers, the Melanesian natives, and even with the wife who writes her husband (Ben Chaplin) she has found another man in the two and a half years he has been away. The scene is particularly haunting after seeing how much strength his wife's memory has given Chaplin on the battlefield.
Malick internalizes the horrors of war through monologues by many of the characters, sometimes to the point of not being able to tell who is speaking. This is effective because we begin to feel that these thoughts are universal, that the fears and questions of one man may be shared by all men.
I particularly enjoyed the solid acting in the Thin Red Line. As the fiery Lieutenant Hall, Nick Nolte is sublime. A man so intent on results that he forgets his soldiers are also real people -- he can't answer the pivotal question, posed by Staros (Elias Koteas), "Have you ever held a dying man in your arms?" -- Hall's transformation, a very subtle one late in the picture, is fascinating. Sean Penn plays Sgt. Welsh with a nobility belied with numbness. His shared moment with Private Witt (James Caviezel) on a worn-down porch is particularly memorable.
Witt: "Do you ever feel lonely?" Welsh: "Only when I'm around people."
I would be remiss if I did not also mention the superb cinematography, set location, and score. During the pre-battle sequences, the camera captures angles as if it was an actual soldier, stalking the actors in the grass and hovering no more than a foot in front of or behind them. The beautiful scenery is punctuated with continuous shots of nature and animals. They magnificently appear onscreen at key moments when the ragged heart of mankind is questioned the most.
The film is patient. It begins not with a blitzkrieg of mortar fire, but with the idyllic Eden of the aforementioned Melonesian tribes. It then joins the "C" company onboard a ship, follows them with intersparsed poetic voiceovers to the island, and continues to wait to introduce the battle itself. Unlike the opening scene in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, by the time the carnage occurs, we can now identify with these young soldiers more clearly. We dread the suicidal orders put upon them, and the effect is all the more grisly. Some might argue Malick could just as easily have numbered off these characters from 1 to 20 and they would have had as much depth; I won't disagree, but I think this is a delibarate technique. When one serves in the army, one doesn't necessarily know who the man standing next to them is. There is only the hope that one of the two will remember what the other looked like, what each has said, in case it is the last time either is seen alive.
The Thin Red Line is unabashed in its symbolism, in its imagery, and in its digressions. The film's title could refer to borders on a map ("It's all about property," laments Welsh), to the thin line between love and hate, or to the shades of gray that seem to cloud a soldier's thinking in hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps it is none of these things. Summing it up would prove as complex as defining war itself, and this is truly a brilliant film.
