"The Thin Red Line" is Terrence Malick's first film in 20 years; it's based on the James Jones novel about an infantry company battling the Japanese on Guadalcanal in World War II. Like Mr. Malick's previous film, "Days of Heaven," this one is memorable for its stunning images, which were captured by the cinematographer John Toll: dark faces of battle-weary G.I.'s (Bill Mauldin drawings come to life); lyrical flashbacks of their girls back home; luminous interludes of Stone Age tribal children and their elders on the island's hitherto pristine beaches ("Kids around here never fight," one soldier notes); flowing water; a surreal foray through undulating bamboo and, finally, the steel-age carnage of tree-by-tree, rock-by-rock, hill-by-hill combat.
Yet stunning images couldn't make "Days of Heaven" a coherent dramatic whole, and they can't do it for "The Thin Red Line." Neither can riveting performances by Sean Penn, Nick Nolte and Adrien Brody, or smaller, often bafflingly fragmentary appearances by John Cusack, George Clooney and other members of a large cast. The book has been visualized but not dramatized. You never understand what made several characters tick, or who is intoning some of the interminable voice-overs and interior monologues. For all of the production's physical beauty, and for all of Mr. Malick's lofty meditations on human madness, "The Thin Red Line" is, at 170 minutes (I saw an unfinished, slightly longer version), a huge do-it-yourself, feel-it-yourself antiwar kit.