The Thin Red Line (1998) - ★★★★☆

Today, I am reminded of a poem by Stephen Crane titled "War is Kind."

This is a pretty tricky poem to understand, because the narrator keeps repeating the phrase "war is kind" throughout the poem. But at the same time, you sort of get the feeling that war, in fact, is not kind at all. When something is so contradictory, it's easy to get lost in the weeds; one might simply assume that this Stephen Crane guy, whoever he is, does not really have a mastery of the English language. That, or maybe he wrote the poem on opposite day.

I'd like to proffer another possible solution to this issue. Maybe Stephen Crane was being ironic! If you think about it, 'kind' is probably one of the last words anyone would use to describe war. Even people who think war is good probably would not call it 'kind'—killing people is not really a 'kind' activity, any more than being killed is 'nice' or 'fun.'

The Thin Red Line, a movie which is not about how much the lives of firefighters matter, does a pretty good job of showing just how unkind war is. It's actually pretty sad. There are so many characters that you barely get a chance to know any of them, even our dear Woody, and are forced, rather, to recognize these young American troops as a mass of sadness and despair instead of the individuals that they are, an unfortunate reflection of the way they are seen by their commanding officers. The battle they fight in is so detached from any goings on of World War II, the war we often find it easiest to justify, that it feels, in truth, unjustifiable (this probably doesn't mean anything. war is awesome and always the answer!). The soldiers kill each other and die on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, a place shown in the movie to be full of fantastical plants and animals, a place so distant from their own world that they are periodically astonished by the wonders of nature around them—plants whose leaves open and close on their own, and giant bats that look more like monkeys. This simple astonishment is startling against the background of the gore and violence that takes up the rest of the movie, forcing the audience upon the realization that war, indeed, is not kind at all. 

Anyway, the only 'kind' that this movie was, was 'kind of bad.' Happy opposite day!!!