Amazon.com Essentials:
One of the cinema's great disappearing acts came to a close with the
release of The Thin Red Line in late 1998. Terrence Malick, the
cryptic recluse who withdrew from Hollywood visibility after the release of
his visually enthralling masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978), returned
to the director's chair after a 20-year coffee break. Malick's comeback
vehicle is a fascinating choice: a wide-ranging adaptation of a World
War II novel
(filmed once before, in 1964) by James Jones. The battle for Guadalcanal
Island gives Malick an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature
of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting
a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting
an exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure
philosophical noodling--or simply let the camera contemplate the first steps
of a newly birthed tropical bird, the sinister skulk of a crocodile. This
is not especially an actors' movie--some faces go by so quickly they barely
register--but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded
colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect
his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The
backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean
Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private (newcomer Jim Caviezel). The
picture's sprawl may be a result of Malick's method of "finding" a film
during shooting and editing, and in some ways The Thin Red Line
seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete. Yet it casts a spell like almost
nothing else of its time, and Malick's visionary images are a challenge and
a signpost to the rest of his filmmaking generation. --Robert Horton
Amazon.com video review:
The Thin Red Line (1998)
In recluse director Terrence Malick's 1998 comeback vehicle, the battle for
Guadalcanal Island offers an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature
of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a
conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an
exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure
philosophical noodling. This is not especially an actors' movie, but the
standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a
deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I.
haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing
discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy
private (newcomer Jim Caviezel). In some ways The Thin Red Line seems
vaguely, intriguingly incomplete, yet it casts a spell like almost nothing else
of its time, and Malick's visionary images are a challenge and a signpost to the
rest of his filmmaking generation. --Robert Horton
Tora! Tora! Tora!
"Sir, there's a large formation of planes coming in from the north, 140 miles, 3
degrees east." "Yeah? Don't worry about it." This is just one of the many
mishaps chronicled in Tora! Tora! Tora! The epic film shows the bombing
of Pearl Harbor from both sides in the historic first American-Japanese
coproduction: American director Richard Fleischer oversaw the complicated
production, wrestling a sprawling story with dozens of characters into a
manageable, fairly easy-to-follow film. While Tora! Tora! Tora! lacks the
strong central characters that anchor the best war movies, the real star of the
film is the climactic 30-minute battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering
that expertly conveys the surprise, the chaos, and the immense destruction of
the attack. --Sean Axmaker
Patton
One of the greatest screen biographies ever produced, this monumental film runs
nearly three hours, won seven Academy Awards, and gave George C. Scott the
greatest role of his career. Scott embodies his role so fully, so convincingly,
that we can't help but be drawn to and fascinated by Patton as a man who is
simultaneously bound for hell and glory. Filmed on an epic scale at literally
dozens of European locations, Patton does not embrace war as a noble
pursuit, nor does it deny the reality of war as a breeding ground for heroes.
Through the awesome achievement of Scott's performance and the film's grand
ambition, Patton shows all the complexities of a man who accepted his
role in life and (like Scott) played it to the hilt. --Jeff Shannon
The Longest Day
The Longest Day is Hollywood's definitive D-day movie. More modern
accounts such as Saving Private Ryan are more vividly realistic, but
producer Darryl F. Zanuck's epic 1962 account is the only one to attempt the
daunting task of covering that fateful day from all perspectives. From the
German high command and front-line officers to the French Resistance and all the
key Allied participants, the screenplay by Cornelius Ryan, based on his own
authoritative book, is as
factually accurate as possible. The endless parade of stars (John Wayne, Henry
Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton, to name a few) makes
for an uneasy mix of verisimilitude and Hollywood star-power, however, and the
film falls a little flat for too much of its three-hour running time. But the
set-piece battles are still spectacular, and if the landings on Omaha Beach lack
the graphic gore of Private Ryan, they nonetheless show the sheer scale
and audacity of the invasion. --Mark Walker
