This would happen in the following films directed by Malick, whose notorious editing process ends up delivering very different films to the ones originally scripted. However, Malick couldn't care less about star power most of these actors saw their roles cut to basically cameos. So when he took the 1962 novel by James Jones to the screen, a star-studded cast joined him - George Clooney, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Nick Nolte, John Travolta, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Woody Harrelson, Jared Leto, John C. When he returned, everyone in Hollywood seemed to want to work with him. This is a deliberate contradiction, as they’re part of an organised army.The Thin Red Line marked the auteur’s return to the world stage after a two-decade-long absence following his '70s masterpieces Days of Heaven and Badlands. Malick’s characters are pilgrim monks, who travel through space and time (within their lifetime) in absolute independence. Conversely, The Thin Red Line is a film about solitudes, where even nature is far removed from man and his delirious project. The major difference is that King Vidor sees war as an encounter not only in the philosophical sense of discovering the other, but also, more prosaically, as romance. The enemy is once again invisible and terrible, like all unknown things, until it suddenly reveals itself as the most fragile of human beings. On a small screen, I saw King Vidors The Big Parade (1925), a film that serves as a sibling to Malick’s, and is perhaps even more humane and bold. While Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) plunges into mimesis, recreating the D-Day beach and putting us next to the fallen soldiers, Malick is not less immersive, but still maintains a firm distance between the viewer and the soldier.īy walking through the door the film had opened, I encountered not just the other works Malick had made before (and I found in Badlands (1973) a taste for escape that feels like one of many repressed pushes in The Thin Red Line), but also a straight line of films that use war as a pretext to talk about coming together. He exposes people’s thoughts, introduces their fears and desires, however banal or tedious they may be. War films ponder on how a normal citizen can become a soldier, whereas Malick is not interested in this change: his film strives to find the man within the soldier, even under the most tragic circumstances. It tackles war not as a dramatic event, but an existential one. And though it represents all this, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) does something different. Then again, the rifle, in its reduction of the field of vision to a single object/target, is very similar to a camera lens the enemy who, unlike in a duel, has no discernible face nor position, is an ideal dramatic subject, in that it presupposes suspense and feeds it with added ideological value. While the Western genre had to rethink its idea of the enemy, war films, with a few notable exceptions, had no such problem: the enemy stayed the same. The two opposing fronts, a genre staple, enhanced the Manichaeism of classical Hollywood filmmaking, providing a superior rationale for the moral distinction between good and evil. Cinema, more so than television, tried to bring war within the viewing horizon of audiences in the West, and did so for political and technological reasons. It’s something that is far away, as though society had taken on the duty of shielding its youths – or at least that’s how I felt, many years later, while thinking about the experiences of my contemporaries on the other side of the Adriatic. It’s the trenches, parodied in Italian comedies, or the battlefield, depicted as ice-cold lines in genre cinema. To those born in Western Europe in the 1970s, war is purely a matter of the mind: it’s memory created by stories told by our grandparents, or the images of Israeli tracers seen on the news.
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