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Year One
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Thin Red Line, The
EMAILPRINT20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 32 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 65 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): War
Written by:
James Jones (novel)
Terrence Malick
Directed by: Terrence Malick
Release Date:
Theatrical: January 8, 1999
DVD: November 2, 1999
Running Time: 170 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for realistic war violence and language
Starring Sean Penn, James Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, and Nick Nolte
The Thin Red Line tells the story of a group of men, an Army Rifle company called C-for-Charlie, who change, suffer and ultimately make essential discoveries about themselves during the fierce World War II battle of Guadalcanal. (Fox)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Days of Heaven The New World
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
TNT RoughCut Graham Verdon
This just may be the greatest war movie ever made.
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made in the American studio system. It's a shining example of qualities we don't normally see in our big theatrical pictures: vast ambition, huge resources and technical genius mated to a unique and compelling vision of life.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Unique and courageous. It may be counted as one of the year's few steps forward in cinema.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
Here is something great and startling -- not necessarily the kind of comforting, consensus-creating film that wins Oscars, but unquestionably a movie that will live in the history of the medium.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan
The disturbing ideas it plants in the soil of the soul need time and darkness ? not light ? to germinate.
Read Full Review >Mr. Showbiz Richard T. Jameson
It's the awesome, metaphysically charged spectacle of man doing terrible things to man within the multicolored and multifarious cathedral of Nature.
Read Full Review >Film.com Tom Keogh
Misshapen but magnificent vision of a soulful quest -- in the thick of misery and fear -- for the meaning of our lives.
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Malick's powerful intermingling of brutality and beauty, his signature cutaways to indigenous flora and fauna, and the gentle lyricism of his disjunctive narration and painterly images are too rich to fully register in a single viewing.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave.
Read Full Review >Film.com John Hartl
Could be called the "Red Badge of Courage" of World War II movies.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
An intensely internalized portrait of external pandemonium, a slippery, insidiously haunting work of poetry rather than brilliantly realized pulp.
Read Full Review >Film.com Norman Green
The Thin Red Line attempts to soar much nearer to the sun than "Ryan." Its imagery aims at our souls. It wrestles with complexity, speaks to us in poetry, weaves multiple narrative strands into a tapestry, opens the festering wounds of war and gazes inside without blinking.
Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
An art film to the core. If it's an epic, it's an intimate, dream-time epic, an elliptical, episodic film, dependent on images and reveries, that treats war as the ultimate nightmare, the one you just cannot awaken from no matter how hard you try.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
Juxtaposes beauty and horror to fashion a savage and lyrical cinematic poem.
Read Full Review >Film.com Peter Brunette
I was so taken by the film's sublime visual poetry, its telling silences, its finely orchestrated editing rhythms.
Variety Todd McCarthy
Like a Rousseau painting splattered with carnage of warfare.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to "Saving Private Ryan" it's the work of a grown-up with something to say about the meaning and consequences of war.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Despite this film's narrative lapses, Malick has a unique way of distilling the poetry from the commonplace -- and for that precious gift we should say amen.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Although the story seems disjointed at times, no other war movie has tried so valiantly to convey not only the suffering of combat but the awful fissures it leaves between humanity's ideal oneness with itself and the world we live in.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Like no other war movie you've ever seen.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
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. 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.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Andy Klein
What Malick has fashioned here is less a conventional narrative than an impressionistic mosaic of our common, yet varied experience of life and death, as focused and clarified through the relentless lens of war.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Elvis Mitchell
One more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Examiner Edvins Beitiks
Powerful war spectacle neglects novel's heart and much of story.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Manohla Dargis
Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
But it is precisely with these contrapuntal strands of huge, timeless nature, of the complexity of every human mind, that Malick bloats his film into banality. [Jan. 25, 1999]
Salon.com Charles Taylor
The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.1 (out of 10) based on 65 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Tim H gave it a10:
This and Apocalypse Now eliminate the need for anyone to ever make another war film. Deep, surreal, poetic, and stunningly beautiful.
Price A gave it an8:
Before watching, hear this: THIS IS NOT A WAR FILM. If you watch it for the action you will be totally disappointed. This movie much like Homer's The Iliad; the war is used as a setting for Malick to express his views on human nature in times of tribulation. The movie features pairs of corresponding characters. The cynical Sgt. Welch (Penn) corresponds to the optimistic Pvt. Witt (Caviezel). Witt is considered to be the main character, with his tranquility and hope opposing the basic feelings of ordinary soldiers. The soft-spoken and diligent Captain Staros oftens conflicts with the angry, bloodthristy Col. Tall (Nolte), and their confrontations play a major role in the film. A few other main characters include Pvt. Bell (Chaplin), a man who finds comfort through his love for his wife, and a lieutenant (Cusack) who leads a charge on a bunker. Flashbacks are used to emphasize the character's true emotions. and, when it is all over, the soldiers only realize that this was one island, all their sacrifice given for one island, in a war of many.
James S gave it a4:
This movie would have been great if it were not for all the faggot actors trying to look tough and mean. What an insult to the true heroes who paid the ultimate price in this campaign. Woody & Buzz could've done a better job
Jay H gave it an8:
Technically it is ingenious. The cinematography is magnificent, the editing, sound and score as well. Skillfully directed by Malick and it has an incredible cast of great performances. Brutally realistic, thought provoking and unforgettable. It's main flaw is it's staggering length.
Ian B gave it a1:
Well, let me blow these ratings apart. My whole family watched this, ages 18 to 60 and we all thought it was terrible. A badly overdone, unrealistic, dark movie that looked like a stage play, pathetic script, campy Shakespearean actors, as wooden as it gets. If it wasn't so damn boring we could have enjoyed it as a comedy. I was hoping they would all die quickly and that was about half way through this home video.
Stung 47000 gave it a10:
So much more than a war movie, it's almost NOT a war movie so much that it is a movie about Men. Deep and meaningful. Unparalleled cinematography. I can watch this move again and again and it still moves me.
Telorand F gave it a1:
Quite possibly the worst waste of three hours I have experienced. I rarely knew who I was looking at, as the soldiers all looked the same, and even more seldom was the feeling that I should care about them. The voice-over-narrators all sounded the same, all spouting a similar, formulaic monologue to the effect of, "Who am I? Why are we fighting? Where do thoughts come from?" When I wasn't bored with the monologue, I was engulfed in a score that lacked any power and swelled when it should have been silent or was silent when it should have swelled. In fact, the characters had no dynamics either. They all acted like scared little boys, both the experienced and those whose first war this was, and it is a wonder they weren't all killed by the Japanese. That would have been impossible, however, as the Japanese were inept at shooting just about everything, not to mention they seemed to enjoy running over the hill towards the enemy, shouting instead of taking up positions and shooting. One shining example of this is when the Americans take Hill 210 and run into the main encampment of the Japanese, much to their surprise. The clearly outnumbered Americans then slaughter nearly every Japanese they can point their gun at while the Japanese simply decide it is better to run away than pick up their guns and fight. This film is misguided and sporadic, having only a vague plot, obscure goals, little to no characterization, and a pace so slow there is time to formulate your own cliche ponderings on life.
