BBM at the movies - The Thin Red Line review

    I've just been reading some reviews of The Thin Red Line to see what other people have said about it because I really don't know where to start, and I have found the perfect review. The first line sums it up perfectly and it goes as follows:

Jez-15 - Auckland, New Zealand:
The Thin Red Line is such a hard film to review:

On the one hand; its gorgeous filming, powerful acting and poetic scripting combine to create one of the most powerful and brilliant war films of all time.

But on the other hand; the fragmented nature of the story, sometimes hard to follow battle scenes and lack of clear outcome count against it. These factors are even more telling against the casual viewer who may find it long and boring................

BBM again:
     The movie starts off at a rather slow pace as it sets the scene for the rest of the film which takes place in the Pacific during WWII, but the tempo does pick up however, when the action begins to hot up and the battle for the island begins. It is not all action like the battle scene at the start of Saving Private Ryan (it would be impossible to sustain that for the legnth of time that this battle is allowed) but rather, it is more focused on capturing the mental and physical chaos that no doubt existed during such encounters and it does this flawlessly, whilst at the same time it keeps the audience's attention with suitable amounts of action, explosions, machine gun fire and the like. It does it in a much less shocking way than Private Ryan but it still nevertheless retains the brutality and suffering that existed.
     The message of the movie is made blatantly obvious - War is hell - and we are shown this during the fighting scenes, we are shown death, brutallity and cruelty, fear and general craziness all expertly captured and the battle for the hill keeps the attention because of the action and the continuing story from landing to the eventual success but despite this there is no main storyline that ties this in with the other smaller "storylines" which are presented to us as flashbacks, to home and to the natives of the island. I can see why these were included but because of this these flashbacks remain somewhat unconnected with the rest of the film and so look slightly out of place and redundant in the movie and this was a major factor for complaints that there was no plot or story or that the story was often muddled.
     As far as the acting goes in The Thin Red Line it is first class. Nick Nolte was the most impressive as the gung-ho and possibly slightly insane Lt. Col. Gordon Tall, Sean Penn (who I like a lot in most of his other films esp. Carlito's Way) is also impressive and the rest of the large cast - a mixture of well knowns and not so well knows - were all well cast and gave good performances.
     The Thin Red Line could (and has many times) been accused of either being self-indulgent, too long, boring or often all three and more. It potentially should appeal to quite a broad range of film-goers - it's a mixture of Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient? and Full Metal Jacket - and this broad appeal and it's potential factors for being a disappointment is probably the cause of the mixed reviews that The Thin Red Line received.
     The Thin Red Line has some faults which can be accentuated if you are of that inclination or merely looked upon as minor faults in what was generally an enjoyable film and pushed to one side so as not to spoil the many good points that the movie undoubtably has. The movie should be viewed and I do recommend it and maybe you can make up your own mind about it.