Thoughts on "The Thin Red Line"

I saw Terence Mallick's "The Thin Red Line" when it came out and felt it was a pretty good war film. But in 1998, "Saving Private Ryan" made more of an impression on me. Which is not to say I thought it was better, just that it had more blood and guts and everyone was talking about it. Since then, though, I'd heard some people talk about what a strikingly different style of war film "The Thin Red Line" was, so I was keen to see it again. And now that I have, it amazes me that it didn't rock my world in 1998. The power of the film hit me like a ton of bricks this time, and I'm convinced it is the best war film ever made, and that includes "All Quiet on the Western Front". Perhaps I'm biased as the philosophical bent of the film matches very closely with my own. But the film seems to overcome the weakness that you, and someone else, pointed out about war films like "Saving Private Ryan", of not getting to see the men killed as anything more than more anonymous bodies. Even though little time is actually spent developing the characters in a conventional sense, the unique use of interior monologues, Hans Zimmer's ominous score, and, especially, the fact that Mallick uses beautiful footage of nature and the native people, at the beginning of the film, thus drawing our sensitivity to the surface before dragging us into the horror of war, means that the violence is almost unbearably painful and, though we may not always know the men being killed, we feel it all as part of a much deeper tragedy working its way out through the whole of human history. That scene with the Japanese soldier's face looking up from the mud was devastating, especially with the monologue which accompanied it : "Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?" Who else would include a monologue by a dead soldier in a war movie? One thing which is interesting looking at the movie now is that James Caviezel did a better job of playing Jesus in that movie than he did in "The Passion of the Christ". The parallels are pretty obvious to me anyway. Not having read the book, I don't know if this was something that came from James Jones or from Terence Mallick. One of these days I should try to see the 1964 version, although I know it is supposed to be much more of a conventional war film.