In the 1962 James Jones novel on which it is based, this is a story about the Guadalcanal campaign, fought in the Solomon Islands in 1942-3. And while The Thin Red Line holds a deserved place in the annals of war movies it is rather more a war dreamed of by Terrence Malick than the one actually fought for in reality. For Jones, the "thin red line" came from Kipling and stood for the infantry, but it was also the line that separated the sane from the mad. The author of From Here to Eternity, Jones had actually served at Guadalcanal, but in the preface to his novel he admits he had created a place of the imagination. In truth, that is the key to Malick's film which, filmed in Queensland and in the Solomon Islands, is as interested in the flora and fauna of the Pacific as it is in the outcome of the combat. So we see American soldiers trying to take a hill, but we see more of the long grass in the wind than we do of the enemy. Beneath it all – the shooting and the talk – there is a sense of the island having been there long before and long after the battle.
There were always some critics who found this approach arty, and the film vacant of conventional excitement. It is a marvel that it ever got made as an expensive American picture, with a star-studded cast. But unlike Fred Zinnemann's 1953 epic From Here to Eternity, which starred Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed, there are no women as characters – even if we glimpse them as dream figures in the minds of the soldiers. It's a deeply mysterious movie, interested in so many things above and beyond war, and so beautiful that the sudden sight of bodies and damage come as a surprise. Malick wrote the film himself and he shot and edited it according to his own timetable. It's a measure of his reputation that so many big names were willing to be in this half-abstract picture – if only for a few scenes: John Travolta, George Clooney, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, Elias Koteas, James Caviezel, Woody Harrelson. But the standout performance comes from Nick Nolte as a ranting colonel whose authority has been questioned, and who is the clearest proof of the army that James Jones loved and hated.