Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line

If Vietnam was the war that America watched in their living rooms every night, World War 2 was the war that they watched in the movie theater. Whether it was minutes-long newsreel footage that would play ahead of the main feature or major works like Casablanca winning Best Picture in 1944, movies were being made about WWII while it was still occurring, and we’ve been getting them ever since. In 1998, 25 years ago, Steven Spielberg released his 18th film and Terrence Malick his 3rd despite both directors beginning their careers at the same time. Both films saw their directors tackle WWII stories of combat with ensemble casts and brought their respective masterful styles to bear with new experimentations; each film irrevocably bears the hallmarks of its creator. However, the films are quite different, and those differences carried over in their critical and theatrical receptions as well as awards results. Despite that, I think that both The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick and Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg are masterpieces a quarter of a century after their debut.

Malick and Spielberg. Malick and Spielberg are nearly opposite filmmakers in the Hollywood ecosystem both in how they navigated their careers and their artistic sensibilities – understanding these differences can help us understand why two movies about the same war can feel so different.

Steven Spielberg is… Steven Spielberg. Chances are if you’re reading this, you’re not just aware of him, he’s made some of your favorite movies. Since his theatrical debut in 1974 with The Sugarland Express, he’s directed a total of 34 feature films (releasing two films in the same year 6 times), won 3 Academy Awards (two for directing), is the most commercially successful filmmaker ever, and remains one of Hollywood’s most significant and influential voices. His two most recent films, 2021’s West Side Story and 2022’s The Fabelmans stand among his best works, which have been consistently lauded by both critics and audiences for the better part of 6 decades now. By balancing his personal interests, artistic abilities, and commercial instincts, he represents the ideal filmmaking career after he helped Hollywood reinvent itself in the 1970s with the modern blockbuster. His style doesn’t always call attention to itself, but his best work feels immediately timeless and his most iconic images rank among the most iconic and wonderful in all of Hollywood’s history.

You might be a little less familiar with Terrence Malick, who made his feature-length debut with 1973’s Badlands and has only directed 9 other films since then, though 6 of them came between 2011-2019. Whereas Spielberg began his career in the studio system, Malick’s was born out of independent financing. With Badlands, he quickly established a name for himself in the filmmaking community with his stories of complex characters giving philosophically wandering voiceovers and aching beauty. After his second feature Days of Heaven in 1978 he wouldn’t make another film until The Thin Red Line in 1998. He has yet to win an Oscar but has been nominated for directing twice and writing once. Unlike Spielberg, his self-evident style, idiosyncratic process, and (until the 2010’s) infrequency of work gives him a Kubrickian mystique with the artistic achievements to match such a reputation.

Aesthetics and Mechanics. Early after he became involved in the development of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg consciously set out to make a film that was representative of veterans’ combat experience in a way that major Hollywood productions hadn’t yet been. The production was designed from the ground up around this idea, and the result is some of the most gripping and intense combat sequences that film has ever seen. The storming of Omaha beach in the film’s opening 30 minutes, where we are introduced to our heroes without even realizing it, is almost more famous than the movie itself due to its sense of verisimilitude and unflinchingly graphic violence. It is also flawless in its sense of geography and continuity – the viewers are constantly aware of where they are on the beach (and truly feel like they’re there) as well as the incremental advances that the American troops are making. However, the film’s final battle is another perfectly mounted extended sequence where this time, we’re deeply familiar with the characters and the battle plan is delivered to the viewer in advance. With a few exceptions, death is dealt quickly and mercilessly in these bookending battles and rarely lingered on; in the opening D-Day sequence, the horrific nature of these images combines with their brevity to produce an effect that is overwhelming in its totality and prevents the viewer from catching their breath. The middle of the film is where we spend time with the characters who gradually build up resentment for the man they’re sent to rescue as their numbers begin to thin and he proves difficult to find; how each man reacts feels natural to their very identifiable and sometimes archetypal character.

Spielberg’s handheld filmmaking style marked a new approach for the filmmaker and served the material perfectly. Everything I just mentioned about the breathtaking sense of authenticity and immersion doesn’t just come from the images that Spielberg creates, but also in how he captures them – basically every single camera angle in this film comes from a handheld camera, meaning that almost every shot looks like what the viewer would see if they were standing in the middle of the action. Every time he changes this approach, mainly for a close close-up, the viewer subconsciously reacts to the change and pays closer attention. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski also experimented with different lens types, removing the lens’ protective covers, and over-exposing and bleaching the film stock, which is why the film looks like nothing before, and little since. Yet with all this experimentation from both director and cinematographer, the film remains a classically told story with a traditional production, especially compared to Malick’s approach.

The Thin Red Line is a loose adaptation of James Jones’ autobiographical novel of the same name and when the news broke that Malick was resurfacing after nearly 20 years to adapt this story, Hollywood’s biggest names were allegedly tripping over themselves to work with him. The result is one of the most stacked ensemble casts you’ll likely ever see, but you’ll be forgiven if you can’t name a single character or even do “the one from New York” the way you can with Ryan. The film isn’t bookended by an extended combat sequence, but the start-and-stop nature of a battle to take a single Japanese position takes up the middle hour and a half of this story. We don’t have a POV character to attach to like Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller or Jeremy Davies’ Corporal Upham, but rather we seem to drift in and out of the minds of several characters from moment to moment. We hear voiceover narration of several characters, see flashbacks to their childhoods or the wives that they’re missing, and hear their musings on not just the film’s action but war itself. At one moment, we even hear the voiceover of a dead Japanese soldier. The combat reflects this abstract approach to character and subjectivity, and while we can hold on to some basic geography, Malick’s film feels far more disorienting. Despite being privy to conversations between ranking officers ostensibly making battle plans, we’re not treated to the same type of geospatially specific battle logistics that Spielberg communicates, resulting in a strong sense of confusion that’s only heightened by the bulk of the fighting taking place in deep elephant grass. That imagery doesn’t just stand in stark contrast to Ryan’s grays, but it also evokes the greenery of the preceding two decades’ plethora of jungle-bound Vietnam films; this is deliberate.

Malick’s process is fascinating to unpack, as it informs the resulting film and is quite the departure from Spielberg’s more traditional approach to production. The story of this film is as much about what was cut as what was left in; the original cut of the film ran something like 5 hours, might have included narration by Billy Bob Thorton, and featured Adrien Brody’s character as a lead, or maybe a co-lead to Jim Caviezel’s. Terrence Malick took a first pass at editing the film with the sound off while listening to a Green Day album, and during filming would occasionally take the camera and just point it at the scenery, even during an action scene. Adrien Brody famously showed up to the premier of the film touting his leading role only to leave angry that he had been reduced to a few minutes of screentime and even fewer lines. Though Malick and cinematographer John Toll more traditionally captured the beauty and horror of the film’s images than Spielberg did in his film, his process is anything but traditional yielding an unconventional and unique narrative even by the standard Malick established with his two masterpieces of the 70s.

Why We Fight. The film’s differing creative processes from different creatives with different formal styles are in service of, you guessed it, different thematic objectives.

In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg’s aim feels easier to grasp and easier to ultimately swallow – perhaps that’s why it grossed over $480 million and won 5 Oscars against 10 nominations, famously losing Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love in an upset. Spielberg’s depiction of war is ugly, with brutal death occurring randomly at best and in a cosmically mean spirit at worst. He doesn’t shy away from the fact that U.S. soldiers committed war crimes such as executing prisoners, and the constant questioning of their mission’s worth exposes the seeming futility of war; ultimately, he argues that through sacrifice the dignity of the cause isn’t just reclaimed but fully proved, and that this war was a necessary evil and brutal experience for the betterment of the world. It is also one of the most technically proficient filmmaking ventures you will ever see, and remains agelessly gripping, searing, and powerful at 25.

The Thin Red Line’s explicitly philosophical and semi-religious indictment of war, all war, as the great sin of humanity against nature (and potentially God) is a bit more difficult to swallow. The beauty of the South Pacific is so effectively rendered that Malick’s portrayal of war turns it into a desecration of a natural utopia. Malick also more effectively captures the flawed humanity in all the mess of war, as both combating sides commit atrocities against one another, but he also conveys the bone-deep bond that men in combat form. He highlights U.S. soldiers stealing each other’s weapons before combat and officers’ motivations of being selfishly callous, yet we never see soldiers outright betray each other though many hit their breaking point. Sean Penn’s Sgt. Welsh might best represent the complexity and contradiction that Malick is exploring by being a hero who scowls at the idea of being recognized, who defends men that refuse to fight yet is unbroken in his own resolve, and who is convinced that there is no “other, better world” yet seems proud of Pvt. Witt’s insistence of the opposite. The disorientation of Malick’s combat filmmaking and narrative approach points to a confusion about why we are even fighting in the first place; though he never lets us off with an easy answer, he suggests that it’s found deep in humanity, and that a “just cause”, if there even is one, is a moot point in the face of war’s destructive power.

The Thin Red Line was nominated for an impressive 7 Oscars, winning none, and made a solid $98 million; lesser results than Saving Private Ryan’s but on a different day I’d tell you that a different film of the two is my favorite. Both are undeniable achievements that haven’t faded from my memory, won’t anytime soon, and are still worth anyone’s time 25 years on.