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Movie Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to help focus your thoughts for your responses and get you thinking about what you are watching. You can respond to any of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Note that I suggest you examine the prompts before watching the film.

Remember that you must complete at least five of the eight scheduled movie posts during the semester, and you will benefit from completing more.
The Thin Red Line, directed by Terrence Malick; screenplay by Terrence Malick, adapted from the novel by James Jones; starring Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, Dash Mihok, John C. Reilly, Jared Leto, and Woody Harrelson

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 next novel we are reading, 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?

 
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