The
Thin Red Line is an extraordinarily visual film. The cinematagrapher
John Toll was nominated for the Oscar and won numerous other film awards
for this film; he later won the Oscar for cinematography for both Legends
of the Fall and Braveheart. The film received seven Academy
Award nominations in all, but had the misfortune of going up against Saving Private Ryan (and Shakespeare in Love) that
year. Martin Scorsese has named it as his second favorite film
of the entire decade — after only The Horse Thief, a
film made in Tibet. Consider what makes this film special as a visual work of art.
The
film begins and ends not with scenes of war but with scenes of nature,
and indeed scenes of animals and plants of various kinds appear continually
during the film. Consider how Malick uses nature in this film as both
visual subject and theme. Why are the images we see of nature relevant?
Malick
often has used voice-overs in his films, though not to the extent he
does in this one. What is the function of the voice-overs?
How do they fit — or not fit — with the action
of the film?
The
original cut of The Thin Red Line ran five hours, and among
the actors whose parts were cut from the film in editing are Billy Bob
Thornton, Gary Oldman, Viggo Mortensen, Mickey Rourke, Martin Sheen,
and Bill Pullman. Other parts were vastly shortened; Adrien Brody
participated in the shoot for months, but in editing his part was reduced
to little more than a cameo. (He remains angry about that.) Still, even as it is, this is a fairly
long film with a large cast and without a clear central character; in
that way and others, it resembles the novel we will soon be starting, The Naked and the Dead.
On whom do you focus, if anyone, and why? If you do not focus
on a particular character, how does that affect your enjoyment of the
film?