The Thin Red Line compared to World War II (tutor's comment: i like that you see the comparison and soldiers do have dreams of something other than the hell they face.)

The movie The Thin Red Line has a thin relation to World War II in the conventional sense. The battle of Guadalcanal is illustrated only briefly in the three hour movie. The underlying tone of the movie is more philosophical than historical. While the battle is related with some accuracy to the actual events in August of 1942, the movie really concentrates on comparing the beauty of nature to the brutality of war. The soldiers in the C-Company ponder such deep questions as, "Where does this evil come from?" and, "Why is love so perishable?"

Only a sporadic hour of the movie is dedicated to the documented events in the Second World War. This hour is wrought with machine-gun fire, dying soldiers, screaming Japanese, and the advance on a heavily guarded bunker over Hill 210. Inter spliced in this hour are scenes of one man daydreaming of his wife, a newly hatched tropical bird, colorful macaws, and other scenes of beauty that are strangely out of place in a war movie.

The movie shows the destructiveness of war through the juxtaposed images of nature, beauty, and peace. World War II is often seen as glorified and its reasons just, but when the scene of the movie changes from a hillside covered with tall grass to just over the hill where people are being brutally slaughtered, the hellish death and destruction that the war really held is evident.

The movie provides an inside glimpse into the experiences of individual soldiers. It shows the horror they faced in battle against the enemy. In the movie, the C-Company charged up a hill into heavy fire against an enemy that they could not even locate. Every time they moved, they were battered with machine gun fire. Eventually, after suffering heavy casualties, they defeated the...