Jonathan Rosenbaum on the second best film of 1999:
"2. The Thin Red Line. I still haven’t read James Jones’s 1962 novel about World War II and therefore can’t gauge the degree to which Terrence Malick’s grasp of collective consciousness, as acute and as eccentric as Kubrick’s, is the product of adaptation or of invention. But Malick’s remarkable, at times visionary evocation of a collective hero–a group of soldiers and officers ruminating in offscreen monologues with essentially the same voice — is basically a reactionary throwback to lyrical-humanist depictions of World War I from the first third of this century, novels such as Three Soldiers (1921), The Enormous Room (1922), and Company K (1933) and films such as The Big Parade (1925) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Malick’s most visible influence is F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1930), a late silent picture that deals not with war but with “natural” innocence and “civilized” corruption in the South Seas.
All this makes Malick’s beautiful and moving epic somewhat questionable as history — unless one can accept his “retreat” into a silent-movie sensibility as a step forward. This isn’t a position to be rejected out of hand: a few years ago historian Eric Hobsbawm argued in New Left Review that “after about 150 years of secular decline, barbarism has been on the increase for most of the 20th century, and there is no sign that this increase is at an end.” He wrote that “the First World War began the descent into barbarism” and that “civilization receded between the Treaty of Versailles and the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima.” With that as a given, taking a World War I-era view of World War II would be relatively civilized — a step backward into relative sanity.
Whatever one concludes about the wisdom of Malick’s philosophical or aesthetic approach, the film’s first couple of hours offer a deeply stirring experience (during the final hour its power dissipates). Many other films this year gained from having a silent-movie syntax, including The Lovers on the Bridge, Besieged, and Winstanley, and there were a few moments in Eyes Wide Shut that gained as well. But The Thin Red Line is probably the one that buys into the ideological content of silent movies the most, for good and for ill."
Rosenbaum's original review:
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=6509
If anybody hasn't seen Murnau's
Tabu, please do so, it's every bit as potent as Sunrise. There are few films (silent or sound) that compare in naive beauty.