The Thin Red Line

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: January 8, 1999

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

78	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 32 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

TNT RoughCutGraham Verdon

This just may be the greatest war movie ever made.

100

Michael Wilmington

One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made in the American studio system. It's a shining example of qualities we don't normally see in our big theatrical pictures: vast ambition, huge resources and technical genius mated to a unique and compelling vision of life. Read full review

100

Mick LaSalle

Unique and courageous. It may be counted as one of the year's few steps forward in cinema. Read full review

100

Elizabeth Weitzman

Here is something great and startling -- not necessarily the kind of comforting, consensus-creating film that wins Oscars, but unquestionably a movie that will live in the history of the medium. Read full review

Film.comTom Keogh

Misshapen but magnificent vision of a soulful quest -- in the thick of misery and fear -- for the meaning of our lives.

Scott Tobias

Malick's powerful intermingling of brutality and beauty, his signature cutaways to indigenous flora and fauna, and the gentle lyricism of his disjunctive narration and painterly images are too rich to fully register in a single viewing. Read full review

Richard Corliss

The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave. Read full review

Film.comJohn Hartl

Could be called the "Red Badge of Courage" of World War II movies. Read full review

Mr. ShowbizRichard T. Jameson

It's the awesome, metaphysically charged spectacle of man doing terrible things to man within the multicolored and multifarious cathedral of Nature. Read full review

J. Hoberman

As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached. Read full review

Michael O'Sullivan

The disturbing ideas it plants in the soil of the soul need time and darkness ? not light ? to germinate. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh

An intensely internalized portrait of external pandemonium, a slippery, insidiously haunting work of poetry rather than brilliantly realized pulp. Read full review

David Edelstein

No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line. Read full review

Film.comNorman Green

The Thin Red Line attempts to soar much nearer to the sun than "Ryan." Its imagery aims at our souls. It wrestles with complexity, speaks to us in poetry, weaves multiple narrative strands into a tapestry, opens the festering wounds of war and gazes inside without blinking.

Kenneth Turan

An art film to the core. If it's an epic, it's an intimate, dream-time epic, an elliptical, episodic film, dependent on images and reveries, that treats war as the ultimate nightmare, the one you just cannot awaken from no matter how hard you try. Read full review

David Ansen

Juxtaposes beauty and horror to fashion a savage and lyrical cinematic poem. Read full review

Film.comPeter Brunette

I was so taken by the film's sublime visual poetry, its telling silences, its finely orchestrated editing rhythms.

Todd McCarthy

Like a Rousseau painting splattered with carnage of warfare. Read full review

Jonathan Rosenbaum

This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to "Saving Private Ryan" it's the work of a grown-up with something to say about the meaning and consequences of war. Read full review

Marjorie Baumgarten

Despite this film's narrative lapses, Malick has a unique way of distilling the poetry from the commonplace -- and for that precious gift we should say amen. Read full review

Roger Ebert

The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality. Read full review

Rick Groen

Like no other war movie you've ever seen. Read full review

James Berardinelli

The director is a poet of images. Read full review

David Sterritt

Although the story seems disjointed at times, no other war movie has tried so valiantly to convey not only the suffering of combat but the awful fissures it leaves between humanity's ideal oneness with itself and the world we live in. Read full review

Stephen Hunter

A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess. Read full review

Dallas ObserverAndy Klein

What Malick has fashioned here is less a conventional narrative than an impressionistic mosaic of our common, yet varied experience of life and death, as focused and clarified through the relentless lens of war. Read full review

Janet Maslin

One more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract. Read full review

Edvins Beitiks

Powerful war spectacle neglects novel's heart and much of story. Read full review

Manohla Dargis

Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction. Read full review

Charles Taylor

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images. Read full review

Stanley Kauffmann

But it is precisely with these contrapuntal strands of huge, timeless nature, of the complexity of every human mind, that Malick bloats his film into banality. [Jan. 25, 1999]