Chloé Kent - IN-CLASS MOVIES #5 – Thin Red Line

While films that fall into what my mother fondly refers to as “shoot-em-up-kill-em-up” have never been my cup of tea, I really appreciated this film's imagery. Director Terrence Malick utilized stunning imagery juxtaposed against such a harsh reality thats being depicted to show the true devastation of war. The film reminded me quite a bit conceptually of Apocalypse Now. Like Apocalypse Now, there was a heavy influence on the nature surrounding the war. A recurring theme found throughout the film was shooting upwards at leaves/blades of grass, so it appears as if the viewer is relatively small in comparison to the large amount of space the greenery takes up on the screen. I think this visual is also interesting because a signal of a coming storm in nature is when you can see the underside of the leaves on trees. In this film, you are constantly seeing that visual, which could be a representation of the storm of the war going on around nature. I also appreciated that in many scenes, the figures were dark, almost to a point where all you could see was the silhouette of the soldiers and their guns, in contrast to a vibrant green of the landscape, so as not to forget that these soldiers are on enemy territory and is a way to show that they are hiding somewhere while still providing a way to show light so that the viewer can still see the action of the figures. Overall I found that this movie was a stunning representation of showing the juxtaposition of the horrors of war, or the profane, with the beauty of nature, the sacred.