The Thin Red Line (1998) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Terrence Malick
Writer: Terrence Malick, James Jones
Stars: Nick Nolte, Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin, Dash Mihok

After directing two of the most extraordinary movies of the 1970s, Badlands and Days of Heaven, American artist Terrence Malick disappeared from the film world for twenty years, only to resurface in 1998 with this visionary adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 novel about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal. A big-budget, spectacularly mounted epic, The Thin Red Line is also one of the most deeply philosophical films ever released by a major Hollywood studio, a thought-provoking meditation on man, nature, and violence. Featuring a cast of contemporary cinema’s finest actors—Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, and Woody Harrelson among them—The Thin Red Line is a kaleidoscopic evocation of the experience of combat that ranks as one of the greatest war films ever produced.

Extras:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Terrence Malick and cinematographer John Toll, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New audio commentary by Toll, production designer Jack Fisk, and producer Grant Hill
- Interviews with several of the film’s actors, including Kirk Acevedo, Jim Caviezel, Thomas Jane, Elias Koteas, Dash Mihok, and Sean Penn (33:35); composer Hans Zimmer (16:29); editors Billy Weber, Leslie Jones, and Saar Klein (27:21); and writer James Jones’s daughter Kaylie Jones (19:05)
- New interview with casting director Dianne Crittenden, featuring archival audition footage (17:58)
- Fourteen minutes of outtakes from the film (13:23)
- World War II newsreels from Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands (15:18)
- Melanesian chants (06:47)
- Original theatrical trailer (02:51)