Apocalypse when?

>> Terrence Malick returns 20 years later with The Thin Red Line

by MATTHEW HAYS

The Thin Red Line is one of those movies which has already become legendary film lore, due to the bizarre and complicated stories revolving around its troubled production. After 20 years away from the director's chair, Terrence Malick, the director behind two brilliant '70s films, Days of Heaven and Badlands, was wooed back to the drawing board by two producers who were in awe of the director's work.

That was 1988. Now--if Entertainment Weekly is to be believed--the two producers have been kicked off the project by Malick, the film's cast has been jostled about (major players reduced to bit parts in the editing process, bruising many a thespian ego), and Malick's reputation as a brilliant nut has been enhanced.

Malick has set about to adapt James Jones' novel of the same name; the story revolves around the camaraderie experienced by a group of soldiers fighting in the battle of Guadalcanal during World War II. From the outset, Red Line has much of the lyricism and poetic visuals one would expect from Malick. The film has an off-kilter pace, and Malick cuts between the insanity of war and the serenity of the lives of the region's native people and wildlife. Cinematographer John Toll richly deserves high praise for his work here; war has rarely looked quite so good.

Malick cuts between the various soldiers as they struggle with the horrors of war. One soldier longs for the wife he left at home; another struggles with the chain of command and megalomaniacal superior officers; and virtually all of them deal with the rather unpleasant business of tending to their buddies as they die of war wounds in mid-battle. Malick develops a sort of mass protagonist, with the soundtrack revealing the inner monologues of various soldiers as they experience war.

Expectations being so terrifically high after 10 years in the making and so much advance press, The Thin Red Line appears as something of a disappointment. The blank cheque provided to Malick to lure him back into the filmmaking trenches may be part of the problem; there are too many characters, so much so that even with a more than two-and-a-half-hour running time, though we understand they are attached to one another, we don't feel much of a sense of attachment to them. Little or no audience identification with the characters means onscreen deaths seem like so much more cinematic bloodletting.

The Thin Red Line emerges as a big, beautiful coffee-table book on war; the imagery is unforgettable--with Malick's style left intact--but the substance one might have hoped for in a film with aspirations this lofty feels sorely compromised.

The Thin Red Line opens Friday, January 15