#107: The Thin Red Line
Part of the Top 150 Films series
Terrence Malick goes to war in The Thin Red Line, and oh, what a lovely war it is! Or, I should say, what a beautiful, horrifying, and philosophical inquiry into the nature of war it is. Ostensibly a fictionalised version of the Battle of Mount Austen, part of the Guadalcanal Campaign in WWII, Malick uses this as a backdrop to explore mankind in all of his complications. What elevates this film is its insistence that war is an extremely personal and lonely experience in which each soldier suffers war’s emotional horrors by himself. All of the performances reflect this spectrum in different ways, and it’s impossible to choose a highlight. As an audience, however, we don’t suffer at all thanks to the astonishing, career-best work from Hans Zimmer’s score and John Toll cinematography. The Thin Red Line is the gold standard to which all war films should be measured.
