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Film Review: The Thin Red Line, James Morrison

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In Malick's new film, his first in 20 years, this tension is gone. The Thin Red Line, based on James Jones' 1962 novel of World War II, pursues the strains of ardent feeling of the director's earlier work but, without seeming to renounce it, forsakes the irony. The core of the film follows an American battalion's fight against the Japanese for a hill at Guadalcanal, and although this core provides dramatic grounding for the movie, it is flanked at both ends, beginning and end, by stretches of storytelling so fragmentary, so mercurial, they're nearly abstract.