The Thin Red Line (1998)

Highly Recommended

USA

Feature Film

Director: Terrence Malick

Writers: Terrence Malick, James Jones

Cinematographer: John Toll

Composer: Hans Zimmer

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, John Cusack, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, Miranda Otto, Nick Stahl

A few minor quibbles aside – Zimmer’s score is, perhaps, a little too on the nose, and the starry cast can, on occasion, prove a little distracting – Malick’s dreamy, sensual adaptation of Jones’s Second World War novel, in which a platoon of American soldiers land at Guadalcanal and attempt to take a Japanese hill, is, never the less, a muscularly powerful yet meditative work, which shows acts of neither courage nor cowardice (staples of Hollywood war films), instead merely depicting human behaviour in all its fascinating anthropological detail. Iain.Stott