The Thin Red Line

Drama, War

Sean Penn	First Sergeant Edward Welsh
Adrien Brody	Corporal Fife
Ben Chaplin	Private Jack Bell
George Clooney	Captain Charles Bosche
John Cusack	Captain John Gaff
Woody Harrelson	Sergeant Keck
Elias Koteas	Captain James Staros
Jared Leto	Second Lieutenant Whyte
Dash Mihok	Private First Class Doll
Jim Caviezel	Private Witt
Nick Nolte	Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Tall
John C. Reilly	Sergeant Storm
Kirk Acevedo	Pvt. Tella
Penelope Allen	Witt's Mother
Benjamin Green	Melanesian Villager
Simon Billig	Lt. Col. Billig
Mark Boone Junior	Pvt. Peale
Norman Patrick Brown	Pvt. Henry
James Caviezel	Pvt. Witt

Director	Terrence Malick
Producer	Robert Michael Geisler; Grant Hill
Writer	Terrence Malick; James Jones

One of the great anti-war movies. It focuses on a group of new recruits, soldiers who have had very little taste of war. They relieve the exhausted Marines who have been fighting the Japanese at Guadalcanal. As they engage with a fierce and determined enemy, the idealism, the patriotism, the abstractions that buoy them at first fade away. The world shrinks to the immediate, the individual enemy, the need to survive and the need to help one's buddies survive. In the end, the only meaning is in that survival. The abstractions that politicians use to justify war disappear. All that remains is the life-and-death struggle, for one's own life and for the lives of one's companions.