![]() You never see this kind of scene played at low volume the quietness of it is copied faithfully from the book.īut Malick has changed Koteas' character to a warm ethnic from the novel's Regular Army New Englander Capt. I enjoyed Nolte's strongly underplayed scene in which he replaces an officer whom he considers overcautious-an officer named Capt. Tall is softened with voice-overs featuring his own careerist resentments and doubts. THE SENSUOUSNESS of Malick's Guadalcanal is complemented by the acting, as if almost all the actors had been chosen for their warmheartedness and humanity. Richard Tregaskis, the war correspondent who wrote Guadalcanal Diary (1943), observed, "I was surprised that enemy aircraft, flying overhead with the obvious intention of dropping high explosives upon us, could be so beautiful." This sort of terrible beauty is a part of war even when matter-of-fact accounts have to list a butcher's bill of dead and wounded men. The jingle-bell ring of grenade pins and the scarlet parrots in the jungle all seem like the impressions of a man trying to take in everything before the last fatal minute. Vivid, glittering images of warfare bubble up to the film's surface, such as a compact sequence of the storming of a machine-gun nest in chest-high grass, each blade distinct and golden as tiger's fur in the sun. Moments of weird, heightened reality emerge throughout. Here's visionary filmmaking at its most perverse: the director took hell and changed it into Eden.Ĭertainly, The Thin Red Line is visually beautiful. His locations are a paradise of lagoons and blue water. Because the real Guadalcanal is still malarial, Malick had to construct most of his version of the island along a stretch of the Australian coastline. Malick really seems to identify not with the men but with the landscape. It's nearly impossible to tell one character from another in his film. Jones was seeking the effect of impersonal chaos you never get to know most of the characters before they're killed. The soldiers' simple names are almost as anonymous as the enemy, the one-syllabled "Jap" (a word like "dog," "cat" or "rat"). Most are distinguishable only by the types of wounds they receive, the types of deaths they die. The book has dozens of characters, including scads of privates with percussive, one-syllable names. Jones' novel is very practical, meant to show the depersonalization caused by the Army. This grand, transcendental and ultimately inchoate film shows signs of Kubrick's Syndrome: the attempt of a reclusive and visionary filmmaker to make a movie that's the last word on its subject. The film marks Malick's return to directing after two of the most highly regarded movies of the 1970s: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). The Thin Red Line is Terrence Malick's adaptation of James ( From Here to Eternity) Jones' bestselling 1962 novel about Guadalcanal. There is no glory in battle stockholding, however, has its moments of grandeur. government paid $7 million to Lever Brothers for damages to their coconut palms. According to Manchester, after the war, the U.S. As the author notes, Guadalcanal was a plantation, farmed by a soap company for coconut oil. Here's one fact from Goodbye, Darkness, a highly recommended memoir by twice-wounded Marine sergeant and journalist William Manchester. Out of the mud, the soldiers fought their way up a fortified 8,000-foot peak honeycombed with machine-gun nests. Marines and Army marched into a rainy, malignant jungle alive with enemy troops and snakes, with tree leeches and malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Ten degrees below the equator and the size of Long Island, Guadalcanal was the site of a six-month-long battle in 1942 and '43. As author and World War II veteran Herman Wouk put it, Guadalcanal "was and remains 'that fucking island.' " NINE OUT OF 10 PEOPLE today wouldn't know that Guadalcanal wasn't actually a canal somewhere. Terrence Malick turns James Jones' 'The Thin Red Line' into a reverie on nature defiled Face of Fear: Woody Harrelson confronts the terror of jungle warfare in Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line.'
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