First, if I ever sat down and watched TRL again, I would focus on the characters of the colonel (Nolte) and the captain. Of all the characters in the film, they seemed the most real.

I know a lot of people thought the colonel was an a$$0, but he was really a very efficient commander. I especially liked the confrontation with the captain, where Nolte asks exacly how many casualties would be acceptable to acheive an objective.

Second, I, too, was deeply disapointed by SPR. Being a big fan of WWII films, I think I was looking for something on a grander scale. To me, our WWII mythos is about the enormity of the task and how we as a people were able to measure up to it. That wasn't my only problem with the movie, just the biggest one. What I liked about it was the attitude that: Okay, we take this machine gun nest, so we can take the bridge, so we can hold the town, so we can drive to the Rhine, so we can win the war . . . and go home.

Was he entirely wrong? I'm not sure; some people I know believe that Malick should have kept that, but perhaps it would have been something difficult to literalize in a movie, as Jones was able to in the book. (Malick half-desperately vetted all his changes to the text through Jones' widow Gloria, who approved of everything and thought it was a fine representation of her husband's work. I agree -- as strange a riff as much of it is [that endless prologue in the islands, which isn't in the book], it's the only decent film made of a Jones novel, and I include the ridiculous, bowdlerized 1953 version of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY in that estimation.)

Nolte and Koteas were playing characters who were very much on the same page -- who could be right? Who could be wrong? What Malick was brave enough to show us was that both of them were doing the best job they possibly could, and they were both handicapped just by the fact that both were human. War is all too often, all too fundamentally HUMAN an endeavor -- with all the screwups and digressions and behaviors that that entails. I think THE THIN RED LINE shows this better than SAVING PRIVATE RYAN does ... PRIVATE RYAN's script is ultimately a weird hodgepodge, elevated principally by so MANY craftsmen who were fundamentally better than the material (Spielberg and his actors and so on -- I wonder why Spielberg so often tries to make it look like "one" guy writes his movies, when in fact he's as promiscuous about changing screenwriters as anyone else in the business. Still, we get single-writer credits on more of his movies than those of most other A-list directors. Besides Robert Rodat, who gets sole credit, RYAN was worked over by Frank Darabont, Steven Zaillian and John Milius -- and I wouldn't be surprised if there were others.)

Thin Red Line was about travelogue photography of plants, trees, birds, grass, sun-dappled leaves, and a bunch of actors mooning about like they've been reading a lot of Emerson. Some film director making yet another Great Statement About War. Hans Zimmer's usual sonic enema. I liked it very much, but it was about two decades too late.

SPR-- I'm really tired of the subject (see the frikkin bible-length thread Howard referred to earlier). The best American film since The Godfather. Sluiced the blood off the American Way of life and revealed it as just another figure of speech. The only one good enough to stand up to Renoir and Kurosawa. The most hardcore annihilating piece of film and I couldn't care less about the make-up effects. Totally rapes that poor guy's Ralph Waldo Emerson bullsh-t. There's your Thin Red Line by Malick, a weak collection of poetic observations in a context that renders them meaningless. SPR cuts the rationalisation from the subject and leaves everything said about that war as the PR and justification processes they are. Nothing is worth that carnage. The general just wants an excuse to use his favorite Lincoln speech in a pompous condolence letter. Ryan needs to be saved for PR. This being a Spielberg flic all that self-justification and rationalisation is dealt with empathetically rather than completely cynically-- it's probably a necessity. Anybody who printed that this was a lame John Wayne cliche movie is a complete idiot. Genre is a form of capturing events in sequence on film, form is the essence of the craft. Many films have been made on the subject of WWII. All of them purport to present a filmaker's idea of truth. Milestone, Kubrick, Stone, Fuller, all used the classic patrol movie form, none of them got hammered for it. Spielberg joined the classical tradition of war genre film by doing it as the most vivid and realistic recreation of combat committed to film, that still follows a narrative pattern in the interest of revealing clues to human nature in war. Almost everyone on the internet and in slick magazines like Film Comment pretends to believe this is nothing at all. I have yet to see evidence that Stanley Kubrick or Oliver Stone or any serious director over thirty, disrespected this movie. Reinventing the war genre is still only half the issue. Spielberg goes deeper. Veterans told him that if he was just going to make another grand statement valorising war without respecting the experiences of those men who survived it, few of whom EVER spoke of that experience, then they had nothing to say to him. Saving Private Ryan was the first gesture of respect to those people. The despised prologue and epilogue with the veteran at the cemetary, always ridiculed as "sentimental", is actually just de-styled, and brought to the level of mundane reality, the level of real people, matter-of-fact. The man's eyes are ablaze with his private knowledge-- if that is sentimentality, almost every twenty two year old Michael Bay fan on the net must have experiences beyond the comprehension of every human being on the planet. The "bookends" are purposely ordinary in contrast to the the main body of the film and the director's most comprehensive feat of filmmaking to date, as if to say, all this technical playacting is nothing compared to one combat veteran's reality. Spielberg has the ability and the wisdom to throw all of it away in the interest of clearing the obvious-- it's just a movie, cannot be anything more. You would have to go back to Kurosawa to see this type of truth vs illusion self-interrogation, but it's been in Spielberg movies all along (he is still Roy Neary). Bushido ethics suggest you place yourself in the service of community, self-less and with great humility without sacrificing strength. I don't know of any other movie maker that lives up to this.

By contrast: Who is Robert Rodat? Just one more overpaid, overpraised latter-day boomer who's nostalgic for an age he could never know, and would probably have a hard time living through were he catapulted back. (I could say the same about Spielberg, except I really do believe he's brilliant, and, once again, PRIVATE RYAN is a better movie than it deserves to be because of his input.)

I read Thin Red Line by Jones but failed to connect it with the movie. Don't know, could just be something I'll never understand. A Viet Nam veteran I know was totally pis-ed with the movie, but he liked the novel. You could draw it out for weeks.

I'm sure it's accidental that scripts get to be good. Hard to nail anything down in transit. Perfection is an impossibility.

What an odd vector Curtis Hanson's career has taken. Does anyone else remember his curious, gritty mid-1980s telefilm CHILDREN OF TIMES SQUARE? A curious paraphrase of OLIVER TWIST, very well acted by a cast mainly comprised of then-unknowns (except for Howard Rollins Jr., hair-raising in his Fagin-type role).

I hope he never gets hold of an anvil.

Thin Red Line, for me, proved to be one of those I'm-glad-I saw-it-but-once-is more-than-enough-thank-you experiences. Cinematography, gorgeous; score, who gives a damn. The voiceovers indeed seemed out of place in the sense it had the feel of philosophical ying yang after the fact being inserted during the fact. The opening and end frames of Saving Private Ryan gained much more respect in my eyes after this. The whole business of individuality yearning to break free from individuality suppressed had me thinking of Pruitt, Maggio & Co. from the one Rocco hates and I like. Am I not correct that the Nolte character/Starros conflict was also being played out via Penn character/Witt? When Witt told Penn "I'm twice the man you are" it later had me thinking that they all did their duty; Nolte was a resentful man who perfomed his duty, Penn also; Starros & Witt both dared to question their superiors while Witt became the hero only after the Dear John letter had him adopting an "I have nothing to live for" attitude. So who was the most noble? Didn't matter, ultimately all of them did what they were there for, which is the bottom line. Compare that to Upham in SPR as mentioned previously.

The maddening use of tight close-ups had me thinking too much of Joshua Logan. I mean it may have made sense if you want to get directorial and make the audience feel the claustrophobic nature of war and all, but it's sheer to hell to sit through cinematically speaking. What a relief when things opened up once they went hand-to-hand! For all it had to say I think the movie could have been shortened considerably.

To summarize my feelings of the movie: You can take it or leave it.