Criterion Blu-ray Film Review

The Thin Red Line (1998) • Blu-ray [Criterion Collection]

US soldiers ponder the mysteries of life, death and nature during the battle for Guadalcanal in 1942.

Terrence Malick, a former academic philosopher and magazine journalist, made his debut as a writer-director with Badlands (1973), a relatively conventional movie by his later standards, although already showing him to be a filmmaker with a striking and idiosyncratic vision. He followed it up with Days of Heaven (1978), where his poetic but precise style came fully to the fore, then disappeared from the screen for two decades before releasing The Thin Red Line in 1998.

The movie is possibly his best — peak Malick, as it were — a seamless blending of the director’s unique and instantly recognisable contemplative style with a strong, if intentionally disjointed, narrative and a convincingly realised historical setting.

He didn’t continue far down this line. Although The New World (2005) was — like The Thin Red Line and its predecessors — anchored in story even while it revelled in poetry, by…