The Thin Red Line

IF THE truth be told I'm not normally much of a lad for war movies. I'm generalising here, but they're too long, their scripts tend to stink, there aren't many women to be seen, and I never did dig the sight of human blood in huge quantities. But for all that, I bounded out of bed two hours early for The Thin Red Line in a paroxysm of fevered excitement (well, kind of) and, in a sense, I'd been waiting for it for years.

Terence Malick's first work, Badlands, remains possibly my favourite film of all time and I've often had good cause to doubt whether I'd ever see another Malick film. As a result his comeback after two decades of inactivity was obviously welcomed with open arms. As it turned out, a number of factors conspired to render the three-hour epic something of a disappointment, but a few moments of profound hypnotic power (visual rather than narrative) did enough to convince me that the film will seem richer and deeper on second viewing - and it certainly leaves your average war-flick for dead.

For all the project's box-office appeal - and in spite of its likely audience profile - Malick is not a film-maker with commercial inclinations, and this film is unashamedly an art movie, with Apocalypse Now its only real precursor in the history of war film.

The result falls slightly uneasily between two stools, and it's mighty difficult to picture exactly what audience it is really aimed at: on one level, it is a visually wondrous celluloid creation to be marvelled at, but it's marred by a script which could have fit snugly into any of the century's dumber war movies.

The problem lies with the script, or more accurately, the portentousness with which it is invested. The dialogue is straightforward enough, a steady drip-feed of profound-sounding but entirely unremarkable meditations on war, life and death, love and violence etc. - yet it's delivered in the sort of voice-over more usually reserved for The Word of the Lord. As a result, the cineaste intellectuals among the audience will be left decidedly unimpressed, while the gung-ho 'hey guys, let's go see that WWII thing' gang will be left scratching their heads in bewilderment and puzzlement.

The film is not particularly plot-driven (Americans invade the island, fight, die and evacuate) but the acting is generally fine, if something short of unforgettable. Three men stand out: Nick Nolte, now turning out acting masterclasses on an apparently weekly basis, is memorably mean and terrifyingly dehumanised as the win-at-all-costs commanding officer. John Cusack oozes integrity as the (in)subordinate whose brain and conscience refuse to let him follow orders blindly, and Ben Chaplin has infinitely the most affecting role, as a rank-and-file soldier who alternately comforts, sustains and tortures himself with memories of his wife, presented in flashback sequences that constitute moments of true cinematic poetry.

A flawed masterpiece, a glorious failure, a deeply affecting experience and a pile of pretentious turd - The Thin Red Line is, in part, all of these things. But it's still a film that can't be quickly forgotten, and if it turns a few million war-movie buffs onto a subtler style of film, it will have done some service.

Malick fans, as long as they're not expecting another Badlands, are urged to attend.