VIDEO ESSAY: War Movies for People Who Don't Like War Movies

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• Ryan | May 27, 2012 10:23 PMReply

  I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Thin Red Line.

• Kevin | May 31, 2012 5:38 PM

  At one point TRL was one of my all time favorite films, even as my position on war movies was evolving into one of flat objection on principle. Especially compared to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN which came out that same year, TRL seemed like a film that could elevate the war movie beyond merely reproducing the visceral sensory thrill of combat for entertainment value, and take it to a level of philosophical contemplation that I had never quite seen before in this genre.
  
  Today my perspective on the film is more tempered, and has something to do with my tremendous disappointment after watching THE NEW WORLD with its ridiculously patronizing depiction of Native Americans in the service of some grand bombastic myth of humankind and discovery. In retrospect I could see the Polynesian natives and Japanese soldiers in TRL amounting to symbols rather than humans. (This is the fatal flaw of most war movies, no matter how well-made they may be: that they insist on reinforcing the one-sided perspective of soldiers in combat in order to exploit the audience's primal sense of terror under threat of death, like some cheap horror movie. In this way the war film forfeits its cinematic potential to break through the barriers of a reality that mostly reinforces our cultural and political solipsism. In this way DW Griffith - the one who made INTOLERANCE, not BIRTH OF A NATION, mind - is still ahead of our time.)