Thin Red Line

            Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the movie Thin Red Line was the way that the atrocities of war were interwoven with the beauty of nature. The movie takes place on a mountainous island in the pacific that is covered in dense forests and lush grasslands. This scenery is often showed in contrast to the horrible battles that are going on as the plot progresses. The local animals are often shown in these scenes and almost all of them were entirely impartial to the events that were unfolding and I think that this was done to demonstrate the similarities between nature and war.

            The life of an animal in nature is a constant struggle for survival. Despite its beauty, nature can be filled with violence and other gruesome images that you do not see when looking at it in a large scale. When two animals compete for survival neither of them are inherently right or wrong, they are both just simply doing what they must to continue living. This movie showed that this is also true in war by communicating the protagonist’s internal conversation with a fallen Japanese soldier. In this scene the Japanese soldier says that he lived a righteous life and was loved by many people, in the same way that Private Witt was a good person that was loved by those around him. I found it very interesting that the film chose to portray both soldiers as equal because it showed how an enemy soldier dying is just as much of a tragedy as an American dying, which is not something that is often portrayed in war movies. We often try to look at ourselves as the good guys in war but this scene along with the impartiality of nature towards the two showed that there are no good or bad sides in the war, only good people dying on both sides.

            There were many themes in this movie that connected to Apocalypse Now. In that movie, war was also depicted as the natural state of the world but the two films took very different approaches in how they portrayed it. In Apocalypse Now, returning to this natural state was depicted as some sort of sacred experience as seen through the improved mental state of the protagonist when in a warzone as compared to being safe in a city. In contrast, Thin Red Line shows that war is a natural state but also makes it seem like reverting to it does nothing but harm.