#747 The Thin Red Line (1998)

Directed by: Terrence Malick
Starring: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezal and Nick Nolte
Genre: War
IMDB

War don’t ennoble men. It turns them into dogs… poisons the soul.

The Thin Red Line doesn’t want to inspire feelings of patriotism in you. It doesn’t want to make you proud of your American soldiers fighting overseas. It wants to drop you in the middle of the fight. It wants to show you the devastation a bullet can cause, and then tear you away before you can process it. It wants to put you in the head of a young man in a strange land as gunfires burst all around him and his buddies are cut down before his eyes. It’s an anti-war film, not in a political sense, but in a moral sense.

Terrence Malick is a unique filmmaker for his generation. He’d be a much better fit (and probably much more critically praised) making films alongside Orson Welles and Howard Hawks, filmmakers who understood the camera as an actor and told their stories with visuals as much as plot. The Thin Red Line is not your traditional war movie, and for that reason it wasn’t well received when it was released. In contrast to Saving Private Ryan (to which it will always be linked), people couldn’t get behind a war movie with more talking than shooting. Instead of contrasting the two films, I’ll contrast two scenes. The famous Normandy beach invasion in SPR is famous because it’s a technical marvel. Beautifully shot and realized, it is undoubtedly inspiring to watch. We are with the men as they travel across the Atlantic, we watch as they anticipate the worst, and watch again as they are thrown into something that’s beyond what they could have possibly imagined. We root for our soldiers against the evil Nazis and despite the carnage, we feel good. In TTRL we are again faced with young men in boats approaching a beach landing expecting the worst, expecting to die in a firefight. They arrive… to nothing. The beach is silent, not even a breeze blows through the trees. It is a terrifying scene. The captain approaches a young soldier who arrived to the island earlier. The soldier tells him, “they have fish that live in the trees”. The point, throw out all your expectations. This is a foreign land, this is a foreign enemy and we are facing something much worse than 50,000 German soldiers on a beach… we’re facing the unknown.

The Thin Red Line is my favorite war movie. Some critics will say it’s too cerebral. I’ve never been to war, but I promise you if I was, my mind would be racing a million miles a second. I picture war as a physical battle against the enemy, and a mental battle against yourself, and no other film depicts that dichotomy as well as The Thin Red Line.

#403 They Were Expendable (1945)

Directed by: John Ford
Starring: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne and Donna Reed
Genre: War
IMDB

This is one of the better war movies I’ve ever seen. It’s nice to see a film from this genre show restraint and get most of its thrills and hard-hitting moments from dialog and tension rather than shooting and explosions. John Ford always directs the hell out of his films and this is definitely no exception. The usual comedic flairs he throws into his films are more subdued here and that stylistic choice really works to the film’s strength; it pulls no punches and is extremely poignant, especially the airplane boarding at the end.

For my money, John Wayne’s only better performance is in The Searchers (another fantastic Ford film). Wayne’s Rusty isn’t the unflinching hero that he usually plays and he excels in portraying a character who wants to do the right thing and be the hero, but is unsure of himself and his place. If you are a fan of WWII films then I highly recommend you check out this film which surely inspired many if not all WWII movies that came after it.