The Thin Red Line (1998)

A major work from a major artist that reaches beyond entertainment to touch the profound; a glorious return for Malick after 20 years.

A totally engrossing film, a near free-form essay in texture and ideas that grips despite being narrative-free; Malick's return will go down as one of the finest films of the year.

The critic describes Malick's poetic adaptation as a singular war film that defies simple appraisal, being in equal parts earthy and high-flown. It is touched by brilliance but sometimes feels like a pious, wishy-washy folly.

The film is rambling and incoherent in places but luminously beautiful and ambitious; Malick has created an introspective war movie unlike any other.

The critic praises the film as a unique lyric epic poem on war that balances romanticism and dispassion while evading mythic spectacle, unlike Saving Private Ryan. It singles out the film's use of light, voiceover, and Witt's transcendent perspective for conveying the duality of horror and rapture in existence.

Malick's first film in 20 years is a personal, poetic vision of war as messy and absurd, with random shifts in mood, breathtaking beauty and metaphysical inquiry. It succeeds as an utterly personal big-budget war film thanks to its imagery and voiceovers, though some characters are reduced to sketches.

Malick's masterpiece is an extraordinary, profoundly rich war movie and mythic pantheist meditation on conflict, violence and death in nature. Its multiple voice-overs, flora and fauna imagery, and central metaphor of paradise lost make it a genuinely epic ciné-poem.

The film is a complex, highly talented work with intellectual and philosophical ambitions that will captivate some critics and serious viewers, but its abstract nature, emotional remoteness and lack of dramatic focus will frustrate mainstream audiences. It presents a worldly paradise devastated by man’s irrepressible impulse to destroy, realized through ravishing visuals and extensive voiceover commentaries.