The Thin Red Line (1998 film)  

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The Thin Red Line is an Academy Award-nominated 1998 war film which tells a fictional story of United States forces during the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II with the focus on the men in C Company, most notably Private Witt (James Caviezel) and his conflicted feelings about fighting in the war, Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) and his desire to win the battle at any cost in order to get a promotion, and Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) and the dissolution of his marriage back home while he fights in the war.

The film marked director Terrence Malick's return to filmmaking after a twenty year absence. Malick adapted the screenplay from the novel of the same name by James Jones, which had previously been adapted in a 1964 film. The film features a large ensemble cast. The project took 20 years to make as Malick spent years researching and deciding whether or not to do it. Once it was announced that he would be returning to filmmaking, many big name movie stars expressed interest in appearing in the film, including Robert De Niro, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Jason Patric, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke acted in the movie, but their scenes were eventually removed. Reportedly, the first assembled cut took seven months to edit and ran three and a half hours, with Thornton contributing three hours of narrative voice-over material, none of which was ultimately used.

The Thin Red Line was not successful at the North American box office where it only grossed $36 million, well below its $52 million budget. Critical response was generally strong and the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best in Cinematography, Best in Film Editing, Best Original Score and Best in Sound Mixing. It won the top prize at the 1999 Berlin International Film Festival. Martin Scorsese ranked it as his second favorite film of the 1990s on Roger Ebert's television show.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Thin Red Line (1998 film)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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