Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99700 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-11-07
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 170 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
One of the cinema's great disappearing acts came to a close with the release of The Thin Red Line in late 1998. Terrence Malick, the cryptic recluse who withdrew from Hollywood visibility after the release of his visually enthralling masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978), returned to the director's chair after a 20-year coffee break. Malick's comeback vehicle is a fascinating choice: a wide-ranging adaptation of a World War II novel (filmed once before, in 1964) by James Jones. The battle for Guadalcanal Island gives Malick an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure philosophical noodling--or simply let the camera contemplate the first steps of a newly born tropical bird or the sinister skulk of a crocodile. This is not especially an actors' movie--some faces go by so quickly they barely register--but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private newcomer (Jim Caviezel). The picture's sprawl may be a result of Malick's method of "finding" a film during shooting and editing, and in some ways The Thin Red Line seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete. Yet it casts a spell like almost nothing else of its time, and Malick's visionary images are a challenge and a signpost to the rest of his filmmaking generation. --Robert Horton

-Gene Siskel
"Brilliant.....a terrific achievement...the finest contemporary war film!"

Customer Reviews

Immense waste of time....
The only war film I have ever turned off half way through because it was so damned boring.
There is no real excuse for a movie about the most inherently dramatic phenomenon in human society, but this was turgid and pointless and lacking any apparent plot, even for someone relatively familiar with the campaign in question.
Proof if any was needed that no matter how many big names you stick onto a turkey it remains a turkey.

Immense
I have to fully endorse the previous review. This is a beautiful, haunting, intelligent, emotional meditation about war, about men, and about how we wreak havoc on our amazing planet.

It's not a war film, but a film about war, and the effect on men's minds.

Those who have given this film a one star simply don't get it, and are probably thick. Amazing cast, amazing performances, cinematography and soundtrack.

War is always ugly
Another film on the US-Japan war in the Pacific, will you say. Of course, you'd be right but of course you are wrong. It is a film about any war waged by the US in any foreign country. That's the first point and it reveals so clearly the absurdity of the tactical thinking of some officers who see the war they are taking part in as a springboard for their egotistic self-satisfied career, and their men are nothing but pawns that have to be moved, by force most of the time, and not the force of rational arguments. Hence, if you have a bunker at the top of a hill, you do not go around to attack it from the flank or even from behind. You just run up the bare slope of that hill under the fire of their machine guns, and you take it. The men must do that. The commanding officer will of course go last, and most probably will come last to certify the work of the men. The second element is that this film shows how the minds of the soldiers still go on and they mix news from home and the famous letters from their wives who are asking for a divorce, and secretly hoping that will not be necessary. And the film reveals how deep the breach, the cut, the rip, or even the abyss is between life on the front and life back home, between the present and what is and can only be the past. Life back home has no future as long as the war goes on. The film is an absolutely fascinating denunciation of the psychological but also spiritual destruction a war is for any soldier who is de-structured and will have to rebuild his own personal psyche, structure, social being, human being, life in one word, afterwards. Third, the film shows the ugliness of war, the dirt, the blood, the din or even the blaring roaring noise, the mud, the physical suffering and death in the name of the fatherland or the motherland, the physical torture that is imposed onto you, that you impose onto yourself, or that you impose onto the others. The best example is how a captain who resisted the silly order of the colonel and whose resistance is shown as perfectly sane since it brings victory and the economy of a few deaths, is nevertheless sent back to the US, with a medal, but in the most disgraceful way: to get him out of the tramping feet of the colonel who is a pure fascist. All in all this film applies to the second world war the discourse we are used to hearing about the Vietnam war and it convincingly shows that all wars are bad, inhuman, inhumane, purely non-human, cruel, absurd, and probably aimless. It could and anyway should have been avoided. A war is for each soldier a loss of virginity, purity, happiness, promised rewards. "They want you to die or to lie with them." And that's all. That bunch of killing, deadly, fatal, lethal lies lead the soldier to looking for another dimension in the world, some god, transcending force that can wrap you up in its arms in a totally sexless and purely spiritual comforting gesture that makes you go on, on the war path of the limited political ambitions of those who govern us. In a war there is no power of the people, for the people and by the people but only power of the politicians for themselves and by themselves. A war, any war is a total loss of freedom.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines