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rlc27 -> RE: Every Time... (7/21/2004 5:19:05 AM)
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I liked Thin Red Line. While I haven't had the, er, "privilege" of fighting in any real war, it seems like most of the history books I've read talk a lot about how most "combat" people spend the majority of their time training and killing boredom. I liked how they got off the transports and no 400 foot tall bunkers with 28" howitzers were waiting for them, in fact, nobody was. For me it built the tension up...you keep thinking that the Japs are gonna jump out of the woods and they never do, in fact it is they who are on the defensive. The book had them on a few occasions blazing away at nothing because they were so edgy, like they kept expecting to see the enemy and were constantly let down...I imagine that mucks with your mind after a bit.
That plus I like how the movie tries to get in the characters' heads a lil, rather than just having them firing away.
But I think people that try to see it as a pure war movie are missing something--it's more of a character sketch in the perspective of man vs. man and man vs. nature, struggling with the pathos of civilization and seeking to reclaim the Noble Savage, that happens to be set during wartime, rather then a series of actions seen from the perspective of a platoon or whatever. It's about those characters' motivations and their history, and how that led them to be where they are. Though it adds a lot to the book, I didn't see it taking anything away. I must say that Witt's character was VERY different though, he was a tough woodsman racist cusser marine in the book, *not* G.I. Jesus.
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