Buy it... if you appreciated the restrained and brooding atmosphere of the music as you heard it in the film, for The Thin Red Line is not a score to effectively approach without context.

Avoid it... if you are in search for more than just one short Melanesian song featured in the film, many of which were compiled onto a separate soundtrack album.

Zimmer
Powell

The Thin Red Line: (Hans Zimmer) Terrence Malick's brilliant imagery was absent from Hollywood for the twenty years prior to 1998's The Thin Red Line, a film loosely based on the same 1962 autobiographical novel by James Jones that inspired a more faithful and traditional 1964 adaptation to the screen. The story of one moment in the World War II battle at Guadalcanal is painfully explored by Malick with his typical sense of intellectual contemplation and visceral stimulation. Above all, The Thin Red Line is a beautiful film, as are most of Malick's visions. Unfortunately, in the process of bringing his glorious imagery to a story, he typically bundles many of his films' other attributes, and his editing has always been suspect. Nobody doubts the quality of the first two hours of The Thin Red Line, but after the battle for the hill central to the film's plot is finished, Malick's plotline loses all cohesion. A series of cameos by major stars distracts from the power of the film's message. The frantic battle sequences and ultra-realistic displays of nerves and bravery differ from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan from earlier in the same year, inferior in a brutally honest and technical sense, but the same lack of romantic gloss permeates both films. One other aspect of Malick's films that typically suffers is the original score, which more often than not is badly rearranged or replaced by the director without much logical thought. To tolerate Malick's methodology, a composer has to be prepared for this eventually and write music according to the anticipatory chopping that will commence in the days just before the film's release. James Horner learned this lesson the hard way with The New World in 2005, with much of his superior score replaced nonsensically by classical music. In retrospect, Hans Zimmer handled Malick in a much better fashion for The Thin Red Line, despite the fact that the director predictably rearranged Zimmer's work at the last moment. "I'm always surprised by the reaction I get to The Thin Red Line," Zimmer said in 2001. "I know it's good, but not many people have heard it."

As a composer, if you approach a Malick film with hard synchronization points in mind, you're doomed to frustration. Studio chairman Mike Medavoy said of Zimmer's contribution, "It's not a traditional score," however, and that's why it worked. Zimmer instead scored The Thin Red Line loosely, composing between three and four hours of music for the film and allowing Malick to have a field day with it. "A musician has a very good sense of rhythm and sometimes of the lines, the voice of a line, the narration should be like a song," Zimmer stated. "Terry sees himself very much as my lyrist. When you don't have the mortar shells going off, I create this sort of sense of silence and in a peculiar way I've been trying to create normal silence or started something that you can just observe and maybe you get drawn in." Some of the scenes had particular cues written for them, but these ideas were typically misplaced in the final edit of the film anyway. The only reason this technique actually worked to a degree in the film was due to Malick's need for music that was as visceral as the film, conveying a consistent sense of brooding and gloomy atmosphere that could easy be swapped between scenes. The many hours of music that Zimmer wrote for The Thin Red Line did contain motifs for individual characters and one overarching idea for the soldiers' fight for survival. The motifs for the characters would prevail in the film, for the most part, but be completely lost on album. Vice versa is the title theme, which was not totally realized for the scene it was meant for in the film, but makes a grand statement in the track "Journey to the Line" on album. The resoundingly growling bass theme for Nick Nolte's commanding officer is perhaps the most memorable sub-theme, heard prominently once on album in "The Coral Atoll." In terms of style, Zimmer's score has little focus and relies on purely atmospheric meanderings to convey its sense of respect and fear. The composer said, "This is literally about making a very clear statement. It's more much along this sort of philosophical lines, actually."

Restrained in every cue except "Journey to the Line," the score differs from John Williams' similarly stark score for Saving Private Ryan in that it makes no attempt at patriotism or a noble heart. The score's greatest weakness is its aimless nature, and yet it is this exact attribute that made it suitable for Malick's alterations. Little continuity exists throughout the music for The Thin Red Line outside of the instrumentation and the title theme, which is heard in fragments in cues other than "Journey to the Line." A number of specialty instruments are employed by Zimmer, though their roles are somewhat diminished in the final mix. The Taiko drums are the most prominent of these, but their mixing varies significantly between scenes within the film and on album. The more surreal contributions by John Powell and Francesco Lupica, which do punctuate key moments in the film, offer pronounced use of Tibetan bowls and a deep electronic effect called a "Cosmic Beam." By Malick's request, Zimmer's electronics are largely absent (outside of some droning textures provided by Jeff Rona), though it should be noted that the French horns and strings in "Journey to the Line" are mixed with the same brash technique that tends to make most of Zimmer's scores emphasize a sharp synthetic edge anyway. String layers are the most typical conveyers of emotion, with the more positive "Light" cue presenting one of the score's few hopeful moments. Some of the interesting moments of ethnic flavor didn't even make it into the film, quantified by most of the second half of the album. The subtle drum and flute performances in "Air" are a prime example of this. Also not used in the film is the cue "The Village," a disappointment given that it's one of the stronger representations on album. Thirty seconds into this cue, Zimmer seemingly inserts a direct reference to the theme from John Williams' JFK. For listeners who can't get enough of the title theme in "Journey to the Line," a dissolving reprise is heard early in "Silence."

Of course, when you're talking about comparing the music on album to that heard in the film, you're in for some frustration. Very little of the music that Zimmer wrote for the picture actually made the final cut, and what did is likely a different mix from what you hear on album. As mentioned before, four major cues on the album weren't even in the film. The famed "Journey to the Line" cue on album marginalizes the Taiko drum rhythm to such an extent that it may not satisfy some listeners. Compounding the problem is the fact that many of these score cues were replaced by Melanesian singing that was, admittedly, quite popular with awards voters when it came time to recognize The Thin Red Line. "Because it takes place at the Solomon Islands, we caught a lot of Melanesian music," Zimmer stated. "We have these wonderful choirs and we're using some of that because there's a purity about it." The challenge that the Melanesian hymns and chants cause is the complete disconnect between the native source music and Zimmer's work. The innocence of the singing is so contrary to the gloomy tone of Zimmer's score that it causes some difficulty with continuity in the film. For listeners seeking more of this material (and it's hard not to get the feeling that part of the AMPAS members' voting was swayed by them), a separate soundtrack album devoted to them is available. Overall, for Zimmer fans, The Thin Red Line could very well be a mixed bag. The power of the film's first two hours will give the music more gravity for viewers than those who approach it cold, but frustration over the placement, rearrangement, and re-mixing of the music could also result from viewing the film. This is one of the rare occasions when a Media Ventures score from the 1990's hasn't been satisfyingly circulated on the bootleg market. The original recordings, upwards of four hours in length, were not leaked in the following ten years to eager fans, causing the few bootlegs that resulted to feature only sixty minutes of roughly compiled material heard in the film itself (and most of these bootlegs suffer from varying levels of dialogue or sound effects).

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In October 2000, however, at the Flanders International Film Festival in Belgium, Zimmer coordinated live performances of "Journey to the Line" and "Light" for the Flemish Radio Orchestra. The former was pressed on Decca's "The Wings of a Film" compilation, while the latter has circulated on bootlegs. The legacy of Zimmer's score improved over time, with a notable use of the score during the 1999 Oscars' "In Memoriam" sequence and several connections to Zimmer's later Pearl Harbor. "You come back to your style even though you try to surpass it all the time," Zimmer reflects after Pearl Harbor. "I feel that The Thin Red Line was a movie about peace, brotherhood. And in a funny way I was working very hard at trying to get some of that into Pearl Harbor because I didn't just wanted it to be another war movie. I think I might just have forced this a bit too much." Not only were parts of "Journey to the Line" used as temp tracks by Zimmer in the production, but the film's impressive trailers coincidentally used the same cue as well to depict the approaching Japanese planes. "The best publicity that The Thin Red Line ever got was when Jerry Bruckheimer put it in the trailer to Pearl Harbor," Zimmer continued. "Everyone wanted to know what that music was, and Bruckheimer did more for The Thin Red Line than Fox ever did for that movie." As a listening experience, The Thin Red Line requires the same context of thought and mood as Saving Private Ryan. There are no cheap thrills and much of the score can tend to be barely audible. Boredom could result for listeners not prepared for this atmospheric touch. The first four tracks, arguably stronger than what follows, are arranged in Zimmer's traditionally long format, accentuating the sense of flow inherent in the music. Both mood and functionality are the key here, making the score the polar opposite of the dramatically transparent The Prince of Egypt, Zimmer's other Academy Award-nominated venture in 1998. As the composer joked in early 1999, "I am a double loser this time!" That may have been true of the Oscars, but both his scores have much to offer in his career. It just so happens that the animated musical genre makes for a far more entertaining listening experience that won't, like The Thin Red Line, lull you to sleep. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.09 (in 80 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.08 (in 253,581 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.