In 1998, half a year apart, two films about the Second World War were released that could hardly be more different. One, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, starring Tom Hanks, was a box office success and won five Oscars. The other didn’t even hit its budget and, despite seven nominations, went away empty-handed at the Academy Awards.
Both are now among the best war films of the decade. But if you haven’t seen the second one, The Thin Line, you can catch up on Disney+ right now.
That’s what Terrence Malick’s war film is about
While Saving Private Ryan deals with the liberation of Western Europe in World War II, The Thin Red Line is set in the Pacific War in 1942. Americans and Japanese are fighting over islands like Guadalcanal, an island of the Solomon Islands. The idyllic natural wonders were sparsely inhabited but of great strategic importance. The story is told by a US Army company tasked with recapturing an airfield on the island.
The structure is much more episodic than in Spielberg. Where in Spielberg a fixed group of soldiers is decimated with every kilometer travelled, The Narrow Ridge jumps impressionistically from fate to fate, tearing through the life of a soldier who falls in love with green paradise and wakes up in green hell while another of who dreams of returning home to his wife.
DiCaprio, Depp, Pitt and more wanted to be part of the war movie
Hollywood stars were queuing back then for the filming. Stars like Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt auditioned for the role of Private Witt, and Leonardo DiCaprio met director Terrence Malick about it. After all, this should be the director’s legend’s first film 20 years after In the Embers of the South.
In the end, the role went to an unknown: Jim Caviezel (later the Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ) gave Witt a face, while other major roles in the cast were played by Ben Chaplin, Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, Adrien Brody and Nick Nolte. Stars such as George Clooney and John Travolta make cameo appearances, while a few others were involved in the preparation and shooting but do not appear in the final cut, including Mickey Rourke and Bill Pullman.
20th Century Pictures
The fine line
They wanted to be part of a unique project. The adaptation of James Jones’ novel The Thin Red Line, while not shying away from the horrors and horrors of war, embeds it within a larger exploration of man’s role in nature.
The philosophically and religiously charged question whether man has left his predetermined path by killing each other, is more important to the story than a classic plot like most war films follow. The whiplash-inducing alternation between beautiful natural idyll and martial horror also gives The Thin Line a unique atmosphere that only a few directors are able to create.
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