The Thin Red Line

Movie Title: The Thin Red Line	[Ads/google-ads3.htm]
Official Website (it might still work): The Thin Red Line
Rating (out of 10): 8
Reviewed By: Michael Stevens
Buy the: Video/DVD \| Soundtrack
The Review:

Hello to everybody and welcome to another edition of the Out & About Movie Review starring me, Mike Stevens. This time we will take a gander at the Oscar nominated The Thin Red Line. But first this important announcement, due to unforeseen circumstances, chocolate milk will no longer be served to Martians.

As to the nearly three hour movie, The Thin Red Line has a lot of action and death. In fact the movie seems almost like an essay on death and how the fear o death affects different people. The movie starts of on a small South Pacific Island with a couple of Americans who are AWOL intermingling with the natives. But soon they are back in the army as the U.S. prepares to invade Guadalcanal and take it from the Japanese during the early years of World War II, you now the big one, and the same war that produced Saving Private Ryan. Next the troops take their transports to shore and take the beaches easily, in fact with very little resistance at all. So the army pushes inland until they hit a ridge, a ridge that the Japanese plan on holding, and this is where all the action begins. First Sgt. Edward Welsh, played by Sean Penn, leads his men up this ridge, but most become casualties rather quickly. So now this company is pinned down, but Lt. Col. Gordon Tall, portrayed by Nick Nolte, orders captain Staros to send his men up into certain annihilation, but he refuses. This is where the other well known actors show their faces, such as Woody Harrelson and John Cusack. Woody accidentally blows his own ass off, and Cusack plays Capt. John Gaff, and becomes a bit of a hero after he leads a small group of men up the ridge to knock out a bunker. Two others in the film with very brief roles are John Travolta (A Civil Action) as an admiral, and George Clooney (Out of Sight) as another captain. Throughout the film the director, Terrence Malick, kept flashing back to one of the privates life before the war, and at other times showed beautiful images of items such as birds and flowers. I think he was trying to show the juxtaposition of the horrors of war to world around all of us, as well as to make everyone consider death, and what that may mean to different people. Also the entire film was a bit surreal

The Thin Red Line is rated R for all of the blood, guts, death, and of course profanity. As to the nudity, well the only nudity was the National Geographic type of the native islanders, which is not the nudity I personally enjoy, but on the bright side they opted not to show the Nick Nolte-John Cusak bath scene, I think it was supposed to be like that famous bath scene from Spartacus. But moving on, the film had good acting all-around, and was a thinking movie. Extremely gory, but the death and violence did not seem as real as the war scenes in Saving Private Ryan, but did have more death overall than the other Academy Award nominee. Others in the film include John Savage, Adrien Brody as Corporal Fife, Ben Chaplin, James Caviezel, and Elias Koteas as Captain Staros. One last comment is that I don't think The Thin Red Line would ever get a nomination for best actress or best supporting actress, and that's because I can't recall any woman with more than a couple lines. So to finally put this review to bed I'll go ahead and give it eight couches out of ten for the Out & About Movie Review Rating. That's all I have for this review of Fox's The Thin Red Line, so see you next time and goodnight.