The Worst Movies... Ever

Congratulations, The Thin Red Line (1998)

Pictured: a piece of shit

The Thin Red Line is that incredibly rare breed: the intolerably boring war movie. Why? Because the director, Terrence Malick, took his superb cast (Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Caviezel, Adrian Brody, John C. Reilly, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, and John Travolta), and the WWII battle on Guadacanal and used them to ask a bunch of lazily philosophical and totally unsubtle questions about the nature of war and existence.

Take for instance this snippet of voice over from Caviezel's character:

Private Witt: This great evil. Where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known. Does our ruin benefit the Earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed to this night?

Uh, what? And how about this:

Japanese Soldier: Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?

I mean, yeah. This is the kind of pretentious rambling brain diarrhea you expect to find from a freshman year philosophy student doing mushrooms for the first time, not a war movie that's supposed to be, you know, entertaining.

The making of the movie itself is one of the great fucked-up stories of the cinema.

The story of the movie begins in the late 1970s, when a pair of producers, Barry Geisler and John Roberdeau, approached Malick (who had made a name for himself with Badlands and Days of Heaven) with an offer of $250,000 to write an adaptation of James Jones' book The Thin Red Line.

Malick agreed, but his first draft, delivered five months later, was more than 300 pages (translating to about five hours of movie), and featured research Malick had done on pacific reptiles, Japanese drummers and Navajo code talkers.

Instead of realizing they were clearly dealing with a crazy person, Geisler and Roberdeau (neither of whom, it bears noting, have produced a movie since, though in Roberdeau's case it probably has something to do with dying in 2002) jumped in with both feet, spending long hours discussing the film with Malick.

According to Barry Geisler, who we imagine to be a well meaning but naive sort of guy:

"Malick's Guadalcanal would be a Paradise Lost, an Eden, raped by the green poison, as Terry used to call it, of war. Much of the violence would be portrayed indirectly. A soldier is shot, but rather than showing a Spielbergian bloody face we see a tree explode, the shredded vegetation, and a gorgeous bird with a broken wing flying out a tree."

For some reason, no one bothered to ask whether the audience would know what the fuck was going on if you did that. Speaking as someone who's seen the movie: yeah, they do that. And yeah, it's baffling.

The project languished for a few more years, during which time Malick worked on other projects for Geisler and Roberdeau, eventually pocketing more than $2 million for his efforts. By 1995, Geisler and Roberdeau were broke, and Malick was off somewhere alternating between laughing at them and crying himself to sleep on books of teenage poetry. Finally they went to Malick to ask him to just fucking choose something.

20th Century Fox eventually agreed to put up $39 million for The Thin Red Line as long as Malick would cast five movie stars from a list of ten who were interested. As Malick's previous movies were apparently artsy fartsy, but good (not that you could pay me enough to watch them at this point), movies stars, sensing a reclusive "genius" in their midst and not wanting to miss an opportunity to get up all on 'dat, lined up 10 deep in every direction to do whatever Malick said.

"Give me a dollar and tell when to show up," Sean Penn, for example, told Malick. At various times, everyone from Kevin Costner to Leonardo DiCaprio to Brad Pitt to John Depp showed interest. None of them would end up in the movie.

Pre-production went slowly, as Malick, in a move pretty consistent with a guy who hadn't made a movie in 20 years at this point, had a tough time making decisions. Eventually they settled on the North Australian jungle as the location. But when it came time to shoot, Malick, in a hilariously dickish move, told Geisler and Roberdeau -- the two guys who had gone broke trying to get Malick's movie made -- that they weren't allowed on set, apparently over a dispute they'd had with other producers on the project over whose name would go over the credits.

The shoot itself ran for 100 days, which Wikipedia described this way:

"Malick's unconventional filming techniques included shooting part of a scene during a bright, sunny morning only to finish it weeks later at sunset. He would make a habit of pointing the camera away during an action sequence and focus on a parrot, a tree branch or other fauna."

The original cut of the movie, as you can probably guess, ran five hours. It took (and I'm not making this up) more than two years to edit it down to just three hours, during which time parts filmed by Billy Bob Thorton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke were completely cut from the movie, and other appearances (like Clooney's and Travolta's) were trimmed until they were essentially cameos. Adrien Brody, told his character would "carry the movie", instead saw his part cut down to two lines and five minutes of screen time.

The end result was a seriously fucked up mess, wherein you have moments of extended voice over, shots of animals walking around, snippets of battle scenes and movie stars popping up and disappearing for no reason (like, say, Jennifer Garner showing up in Catch Me if You Can, except a whole movie like that).

I suppose, as much as anyone, I should blame the reviews, which were actually inexplicably good (79% on Rottentomatoes.com). Martin Scorsese actually called it his second favorite film of the 1990s (behind what, Cool As Ice?). Based on them, I bought the movie without having seen it or talked to anyone who saw it (ugh). And I still have it. A few days ago I rearranged my DVD collection, and there it was, laughing at me.

But through all of this, the movie does have at least one redeeming quality.

In one scene, Woody Harrelson gets his ass blown off. Literally.

@2:30