After initial positive reviews of “The Thin Red Line,” there is now a curious backlash wave of scathing criticism about it. I feel sorry for these obtuse, dense moviegoers who somehow find perverse comfort in jumping on the bandwagon of their equally thickheaded cheerleader, Richard Christiansen. He appears to be leading them in condemning a movie that none of them (including Christiansen) remotely understands. Apparently these people are so linear and dull-witted that if a film doesn’t lead them by the nose from point A to B, they scream “There’s no plot!” and entirely dismiss it. What they don’t get is that war — and life in general — does not always proceed logically and simply from point to point but often meanders down tangential pathways, sometimes returning to previous threads, sometimes not.
The lush cinematography showing soldiers shooting blindly and desperately into the windswept grassy mountains is a visual metaphor for how chaotic, random, futile and imprecise war really is. The thoughts of the soldier remembering peaceful, romantic, idyllic scenes with his fiance are not “a development that went nowhere,” as one simple-minded viewer complained. Rather, the soldier’s daydreaming was the only psychological escape and comfort for someone caught in the middle of the insanity and terror of battle. The scenes of incomparable beauty of the landscape at one moment alternating with the sudden ugly brutality and carnage of battle the next reflected the bizarre polar opposites of experience that these men encountered in Guadalcanal.
Perhaps such unsophisticated (and perhaps soulless) moviegoers should stick to experiences they can more easily comprehend, like Disney movies.
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