The Thin Red Line is not only the worst war film ever made, it may be the worst film ever made. I thought the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film was about a grandson of a World War II veteran who was getting high with the natives during some kind of Peace Corps mission. The ahistoricism and anachronism only got worse from that point on. How many times did we need to see the waving grass? Yes, I get it, people are being cut down like grass, nature is the only thing that remains constant, etc, etc. During the film we are told three times that Guadalcanal had absolutely no military significance. Rather, the island was invaded so that a few officers could win some medals. I'm not sure that I can say bullshit on such an intellectual listserv, but it certainly applies to the idea that Guadalcanal had no military significance. As Dan Shaw has correctly pointed out, the invasion of Guadalcanal was absolutely pivotal to the success of the Allied war effort against the Imperial Japanese state. On another point, if the American soldiers had spent as much time crying as they did in this movie, we would never have won the war. Finally, the Americans are presented in the film as ruthless invaders of this island while the Japanese are presented as honorable, if not actually peaceful, defenders of their homes. I know it's fashionable to rewrite history with a total disregard for the facts (I think it's called postmodernism), but this revisionism is nauseating. By the time the film crawled to its dismal ending, I noticed that there were more people in the lobby waiting for their companions to finish watching the film than in the theatre. It's common knowledge that this was a fairly typical reaction in most cities to this waste of celluloid.
Richard Schellhammer
Dept. of History
University of West Alabama
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