Saving Private Ryan got the praise – but The Thin Red Line wins the battle of the war films

In 1998, two rival Second World War epics were released within months of each other. But while Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ soaked up Oscars and is receiving a splashy cinema re-release this week – to mark its 25th anniversary – Terence Malick’s poetic ‘The Thin Red Line’ remains divisive. But one is clearly more visionary than the other, writes Geoffrey Macnab

Spielberg vs Malick: Tom Hanks in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and Woody Harrelson in ‘The Thin Red Line’ (Paramount/Fox)

Midway through filming the D-Day beach landing in Saving Private Ryan (1998), Steven Spielberg turned to his leading actor Tom Hanks, then as now one of the world’s most popular stars, and told him, “despite you being in this movie, nobody’s showing up”.

The director was convinced that audiences simply wouldn’t accept the stomach-churning violence of the 20-minute sequence near the start of the movie. Shot in juddering fashion with hand-held cameras, this blood-saturated overture depicts American GIs being incinerated, their guts spilling out, and their limbs being blown off. The moment they step off their landing crafts, the slaughter begins. At one moment, a bullet hits a soldier’s tin helmet and bounces off. He removes the helmet to inspect it, but the next bullet goes through his skull.

In spite of the director’s worries, the film – re-released in cinemas this week to mark its 25th anniversary – was a massive box office hit, won Oscars, and was praised by critics and army veterans alike. Nonetheless, it’s as noticeable now as it was a quarter of a century ago that almost every discussion about it begins and ends with those early moments of carnage on the Normandy beach. Somehow, the rest of the story, including the mission behind enemy lines to rescue Private Ryan (Matt Damon) and the sequences showing Ryan as an old man, are forgotten.

It’s easy to understand why the beach landing had such a seismic impact. This is one of the most extraordinary and most out-of-character sequences that Spielberg has ever shot. Whereas gun fights with Nazis in his Indiana Jones movies are played for excitement and laughs, the killing of Saving Private Ryan’s American soldiers is filmed with nightmarish, newsreel-style intensity. “We were attempting to put fear and chaos on film,” he later explained. “If the lens got splattered with sand and blood, I didn’t say ‘Oh my God the shot is ruined, we have to do it again’ – we just used it in the picture.”

Maverick American director Sam Fuller, who had been an infantryman during the 1944 Normandy landings, once commented that “to make a real war movie would be to occasionally fire at the audience from behind the screen during battle scenes”. In a sense, Spielberg (a big Fuller fan) was following this edict. He may not have been taking potshots at the viewers, but he wanted to put them in the middle of the carnage.

The landings were filmed at Curracloe Beach in Wexford, Ireland. Those who were there talk of the deafening noise from the machine gun fire and explosions. Assistant director Daisy Cummins remembers that Spielberg’s cinematographer Janusz Kamiński gave cameras to camera trainees and encouraged them to venture into the middle of the maelstrom. Amputees were drafted in to play soldiers being wounded. “If you’re going to do something graphic like, say, blowing somebody’s leg off, then obviously you’re going to use an amputee,” she notes.

Spielberg and his team had come to Ireland hoping for rain (the weather during D-Day was windy and cloudy.) However, for much of the time, the crew was faced with beautiful weather. Noel Donnellon, working as Spielberg’s video supervisor, recalls that Kamiński burned black kerosene to “create a slight haze” and block out the sun. “But then one day the weather did turn [for the worse] and Spielberg asked everybody if we were happy to jump ahead for what we had planned for a week’s time, which was actually the main landing scene. We all said yes and scrambled to get 11 cameras ready.”

A quarter of a century on, the beach scenes remain as shocking as when the film was first released. Saving Private Ryan, though, is a strangely uneven movie. Once we’ve seen the final images of all the corpses and dead fish with red-tinged waves lapping over them, the film changes dramatically. After taking viewers into hell, Spielberg leads them on a much more conventional path. The rest of the film focuses on a near-suicidal mission to rescue a single solider whose brothers have all been killed.

Military men: Edward Burns, Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Tom Sizemore and Barry Pepper in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ (Paramount)

Spielberg is one of cinema’s greatest problem solvers. Collaborators marvel at his ability to improvise and the speed with which he works. “We were originally meant to shoot the French rural scenes in France, but as it looked the same, [Spielberg] said why not shoot it [in Wexford],” Donnellon remembers.

Hanks’s character Captain Miller is similarly pragmatic. Whatever adversities he and his men encounter as they criss-cross war-torn France in search of the elusive Ryan, he always comes up with solutions. He’s a small-town high school teacher who has endless reserves of decency and common sense – an all-American hero and someone with whom the director clearly identifies closely.

There are further extremely brutal moments (Vin Diesel’s Private Caparzo bleeding to death in the rain; the horribly wounded medic Wade, played by Giovanni Ribisi, pleading for morphine; Hanks himself coming face to face with a Nazi tank). By now, though, we know that Private Ryan will get home. This is no longer a story about fear and chaos but a familiar tale of resourceful American soldiers finding solutions, even at the cost of their own lives. Spielberg steps away from the abyss and embraces patriotism instead. He rounds off his movie with a shot of the American flag billowing in the breeze.

Much more fuss is being made about the 25th anniversary of Saving Private Ryan than about Terrence Malick’s Second World War movie, The Thin Red Line (1998), released just a few months later to a relatively subdued reception. Marking the enigmatic Malick’s comeback as a director 20 years after Days of Heaven (1978), this too was a sprawling epic with an all-star cast, but it came at the Second World War in a much more personal and idiosyncratic fashion.

Malick begins his movie with a dreamy interlude on a South Sea island. Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) has gone awol and is spending time with the local tribespeople, communing with nature. The film, loosely adapted from the James Jones novel, deals with the Battle of Guadalcanal, but its early scenes play like an exquisitely shot National Geographic travelogue. There are few signs of the conflict ahead as Malick shows us gorgeous imagery of insects, plant life and doe-eyed kids playing in the sand. The only hint of trouble in paradise is the shot of a menacing crocodile sliding into the water.

Cameo: George Clooney in ‘The Thin Red Line’ (Fox)

Detractors found The Thin Red Line to be rambling and self-indulgent, “with no firm idea of what it is about”, as influential reviewer Roger Ebert complained. Malick was reflecting on how war was experienced by a handful of individuals. He was trying to get inside the consciousness of these characters, using poetic voiceover to share their most intimate thoughts and showing their faces in huge close-ups.

Next to the hard-edged clarity of Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line seems very opaque. Nonetheless, a strong argument can be made that it is the superior film, and certainly the more formally adventurous. It has a dream-like feel throughout.

“Maybe all men got one big soul, who everybody’s a part of, all faces of the same man, one big self,” we hear Witt meditating as he walks past the corpses and wounded, disfigured bodies of his comrades. Elegiac music plays on the soundtrack. At one stage, a Japanese corpse seems to start speaking. The most macho characters (for example Nick Nolte’s growling martinet Lieutenant Colonel Tall) will suddenly quote Homer. Malick continually contrasts the sublime beauty of the jungle surroundings with the violence and squalor that accompanies the soldiers as they crawl through the tall grass-like termites.

Overlooked: Jim Caviezel in ‘The Thin Red Line’ (Fox)

Cinematographer John Toll told me that when he was filming The Thin Red Line in the South Pacific, he was in constant email contact with his wife Lois Burwell, who was in charge of make-up for Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan back in Europe. She would explain what an exciting time she was having with the prosthetics and blood rigs for the battle scenes. Toll couldn’t help but feel jealous. “I was thinking, ‘oh great, they’re over there making the movie I want to make, and with Terry [Malick] all we are shooting are crocodiles and birds!’”

Toll, though, soon grasped what the director was doing. He likened The Thin Red Line to a silent movie in which “the dialogue isn’t as important as the visuals or the voiceovers – the poetic and philosophical internal monologues”. This wasn’t so much a conventional war movie (although it has its share of explosions and a very high body count) as it was “a compilation of thoughts and visions”.

You can’t help but marvel at Malick’s chutzpah. He had assembled an all-star cast (some of whom, such as George Clooney and John Travolta, barely feature on screen) and had spent over $50m making what was essentially an experimental arthouse movie about the pity and horror of war.

Unsurprisingly, Malick didn’t win any Oscars. His film’s worldwide box office was less than $100m (a fraction of the $482m that Spielberg’s epic achieved). A quarter of a century on, The Thin Red Line still languishes in the shadow of Saving Private Ryan. But any comparison between the rival Second World War movies must surely acknowledge that while Spielberg was the better storyteller, Malick was the visionary.

‘Saving Private Ryan’ is back in cinemas; ‘The Thin Red Line’ is streaming on Disney+