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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Thin Red Line, The
20th Century Fox Film Corporation


8.2

based on 32 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 56 votes
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FILM:

MPAA 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)

GENRE(S):	War
WRITTEN BY:	James Jones (novel) Terrence Malick
DIRECTED BY:	Terrence Malick
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: November 2, 1999 Video: November 2, 1999 Theatrical: January 8, 1999
RUNNING TIME:	170 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

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...

100

TNT RoughCut Graham Verdon

This just may be the greatest war movie ever made.

100

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.

100

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Unique and courageous. It may be counted as one of the year's few steps forward in cinema.

100

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.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

The disturbing ideas it plants in the soil of the soul need time and darkness ? not light ? to germinate.

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.

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.

Time Richard Corliss

The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave.

Film.com John Hartl

Could be called the "Red Badge of Courage" of World War II movies.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

An intensely internalized portrait of external pandemonium, a slippery, insidiously haunting work of poetry rather than brilliantly realized pulp.

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.

Newsweek David Ansen

Juxtaposes beauty and horror to fashion a savage and lyrical cinematic poem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Like no other war movie you've ever seen.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The director is a poet of images.

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.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess.

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.

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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

San Francisco Examiner Edvins Beitiks

Powerful war spectacle neglects novel's heart and much of story.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction.

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 8.2 (out of 10) based on 56 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Fin C gave it a10:
This isn't just a war movie. It's an existential examination of the nature of man's conflict within the context of nature, humanity, hierarchy and survival. The voice overs, the cinematography, the diaglogue, the acting, the tension, the brutality, the brotherhood....and who can forget the music. I could go on and on and on. A unforgettable cinematic masterpiece which gets better with each extra viewing. There can be no higher recommendation for a literary deconstruction on the nature of man and conflict. Quite simply breathtaking.

Simon M. gave it a10:
Sublime, deeply moving work of beauty and redemption. A meditation on reality. This film is a spiritual experience. It is one of the greqtest films ever made.

Bob B. gave it a9:
I completely agree with Dileep R. This movie is very underrated.. not only is it well-written, well acted, and well-filmed, on beautiful islands with awesome imagery, it also tackles the morality and harsh reality of war. Even Spielburgs "Saving Pvt. Ryan" failed to do that. The only film I'd say does that as well is "Flags of our Fathers". This is a must see for every person who comes across it. We owe it to our veterans to at least acknowledge what they went through, and that is, the insanity of war. Or, as Dileep R. put it, "industrial murder". Good phrase.

Jonathan M gave it a10:
This film is heavily underated for it's coherent use of cinematography and silent timing. Not your average war film, conveys underlying theme throughout.

Dileep R. gave it a10:
One of the great films of a great filmmaker. Patient, frightening, daunting. It best captures the random horror and pointlessness of war, sometimes the shock erupting from boredom. The context-less death. The meaninglessness of a 'mission' or any moral framework given to industrial murder, what we call war. It might even be necessary at times, but this is one of the few films that isn't a hallmark card to the participants; it's a simulcrum of what they went through, the price of it all. No one who advocates war, especially those that want to beat their chests about the might of this nation, should do so without understanding what this film captures: the price of conflict, the horror of warfare.

Douglas gave it a10:
"Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard are sweeter" - Keats. The most devastating (and devastatingly beautiful) moments in this movie happen in silence. It is so rare and wonderful to find such an brave and strangely intimate meditation on good and evil, beauty and horror.

Joyce M. gave it a2:
Ridiculous. The emperor is without clothes.

Thin Red Line, The 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Thin Red Line, The
20th Century Fox Film Corporation