This masterful, beautiful picture by the underknown and underrated Cornel Wilde is a haunting look at the combat experience. Depending on one's point of view, Terrence Malick either paid tribute to it or blatantly copied it in THE THIN RED LINE (1998). The movies are amazingly similar in the way they use flashbacks and voiceover narration (as characters' thoughts spoken aloud) to immerse the audience in the characters as they fight. I love both movies -- Malick's has things going for it that Wilde's doesn't, such as a physical beauty and a superb score -- but BEACH RED is in some ways the more powerful of the two. It's even more immediate. The voiceovers are less forced and don't really go into the philosophizing that the voiceovers in THIN RED LINE do. The effect is to keep the audience more focused on the combat itself. In short, BEACH RED is more emotional (whereas THIN RED LINE is emotional AND philosophical/metaphorical).
The way this movie opens with 30 minutes of pure combat on a beach is also similar to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. In fact, BEACH RED is something of a combination of that movie and THIN RED LINE. Spielberg and Malick surely must both have studied this picture carefully. The last 5 minutes of BEACH RED comprise one of the most haunting and powerful statements on combat I have ever seen. This is a movie that will leave you thinking for a long time.
