9/12/2023 0 Comments Redline movieAgainst these simple pleasures is stacked the ideology of war, as expressed by a colonel ( Nick Nolte) who read Homer at West Point ("in Greek") and is intoxicated to be in battle at last after having studied it so long. But reality interrupts when the two soldiers are captured and returned to their Army company for the assault on a crucial hill on Guadalcanal.ĭuring the battle scenes, there will be flashbacks to the island idyll-and other flashbacks as a soldier remembers his love for his wife. This is, the movie implies, a society that reflects man's best nature. Two soldiers have gone AWOL and live blissfully with tribal people who exist in a pre-lapsarian state, eating the fruit that falls from the trees and the fish that leap from the seas, and smiling contentedly at the bounty of Eden. The film opens with an idyll on a Pacific island. In a way the film is not about war at all, but simply about the way in which all living beings are founded on the necessity of killing one another (and eating each other, either literally or figuratively). Later, as men prove more deadly than crocodiles, it shows a bird, its wing shattered by gunfire, pulling itself along the ground. The film opens with a question: "Why does nature contend with itself?" It shows a crocodile, a killing machine. Both films are founded on a transcendental sense that all natural things share their underlying reality in the mind of God. "The Thin Red Line" feels like an extension of the second film, in which a narrator muses on the underlying tragedy that is sometimes shown on the screen, sometimes implied. Terrence Malick is the director of two of the best films I have ever seen, " Badlands" (1973) and " Days of Heaven" (1978). They all seem to be musing in the same voice, the voice of a man who is older, more educated, more poetic and less worldly than any of these characters seem likely to be: the voice of the director. The soundtrack allows us to hear the thoughts of the characters, but there is no conviction that these characters would have these thoughts. It's like horror seen through the detachment of drugs or dementia. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality. The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. My guess is that any veteran of the actual battle of Guadalcanal would describe this movie with an eight-letter word much beloved in the Army. This leads to an almost hallucinatory sense of displacement, as the actors struggle for realism, and the movie's point of view hovers above them like a high school kid all filled with big questions. The actors in "The Thin Red Line" are making one movie, and the director is making another.
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