The Thin Red Line

Without a plot a film is just a series of events occurring in a somewhat organized manner. The goal of filmmaking is to create a film that tells a story and engages the audience, setting a mood and forcing the audience to think and follow the storyline. In the film The Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick did the exact opposite. His film conveyed no plot what so ever.

The filmmaker is responsible for successfully expressing their plots and underlying subplots to make a film seem much more intriguing and well as the ability fully engage and immerse the audience through the power of visual story telling. It is ultimately the filmmaker’s responsibility to keep the audience in mind when creating a work of art, since the films are ultimately produced for the audience’s viewing pleasure. The greatest of film stories are able to convey the filmmaker’s inner thoughts in a subtle and captivating way, though the filmmaker shouldn’t go so far as to compromise the integrity of their film just to please the audience. A story shouldn’t be written purely on the principle of audience acceptance, but to some extent it is acceptable to make changes to comply with the views of society.

The nature of the production of The Thin Red Line was unpredictable and seemingly unorganized. There were odd segments of video, such as the alligator entering the water at the opening of the film and the struggling baby bird, which seemed to have no real significance or relation to the progression of the film. Malick failed in the aspect of creating a vision in filmmaking, but that’s not to say the film was a failure. True it has no real plot, but it has a decent story behind it that makes it an acceptable but lacking film.