The Thin Red Line

Directed by Terrence Malick 


The first time that I saw "The Thin Red Line," the 1998 film directed by Terrence Malick, I kind of hated it. I barely understood what it was about and it seemed to me absurdly long and sentimental. But that was then. I just saw it again a few days ago and I came to understand a couple of things this time: first, my initial frustration of those days. Second, the deep conviction of the director that prevented him from making a more standard, cohesive movie and rather forced him to create a disjointed work or art. Imperfect but genuine. A jewel made for posterity.

It's hard to think of this movie as a war movie, in spite of the fact that it holds some of the most vivid war scenes I have ever seen. This is mostly because of the tone inserted at the beginning of the story, when some AWOL soldiers live in hiding from the war among some remote Islanders. Since then, Malick floods the movie with first person narrations of the characters reasoning their past and present, questioning life and God, thinking about the world they live in.

So many characters and renown actors come and go that it's hard to keep account of them, and at the end the spectator remembers just a few ones, who die or disappear just the same. Also, heroism, self-interest and pure generosity come and go from the screen, as a means to paint the absurdity of life without denouncing war as an intrusion or an anomaly in a perfect world, but rather assuming its futility as part of the futility of life itself.

All of this might be too much for the average moviegoer that, more or less expects going from A to Z. The whole plot --if we could talk about a plot in the whole movie-- is about the take of Guadalcanal by U.S. forces against the fiery resistance by the Japanese. We see how the Americans soldiers go from frightened little pups to develop a sense of entitlement to their superiority at the end. The Japanese, that start bringing fear with their accurate, massive, efficient attacks, crumble into insanity and bottomless desperation at the end.

But among all this nonsense and destruction paradoxically portrayed as such in the middle of the Second World War --the only "good war" in American history-- Malick proposes art as an escape. Beauty as salvation from our sins. Mankind's redeeming quality. We have the power to imagine, he seems to be saying. The power to create and enjoy and, most of all, the power to create beauty. We'll destroy it in the end of course. But it's good to remember.