Retrospective: The Thin Red Line

Terrence Malick's world is not anthropocene. It is a world in which man exists in continuity with — or has broken its link to — flora and fauna. Shots of troopers hiding in the vegetation of Guadalcanal are intercut with a chameleon climbing a tree. The human carnage of battle is interrupted by a shot of a mortally wounded baby bird. An alligator appears onscreen before any human beings do. War is a catastrophic disruption to the natural order — and yet, because it exists in the natural world, it's beautiful. The shadow of smoke on the hills of the Solomon Islands is gorgeous; a plume of war that can't stop itself from creating beauty.

The Thin Red Line is full of characters wrestling with the awful interruption of war, an interruption to nature, to marriage, to life itself. Malick, a child of World War II, is fixated on the ontological horror of it. He wants to understand the great catastrophe that created him and warped the world. He has spent his first three movies wrestling with the great paradox of America: a vast tableau of beauty and a battlefield for an intractable war. The Thin Red Line is a Vietnam War film about World War II, eschewing nationalist pride and jingoism in an attempt to wrestle with the contradictions of our world. If you can get past Hans Zimmer's score, it's the best World War II film of 1998.