Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line?

Both great and deeply flawed. TRL for me.

SPR is brilliant at the outset, the opening a commentary on most war movies where we get to know the people up front, here they just die randomly and we struggle to process it. It gets worse as it progresses, it's ending scene contradicts everything that came before it to me, I hated it.

The Thin Red Line is the same way except it's more hippie-ish (Malick's thing) and less tough, but strikingly philosophical.........when it comes to the point where it becomes a typical Malick film (man ruining God's Paradise) it runs out of gas.

Both are like 8ish........

Saving Private Ryan has a virtuoso opening twenty minutes and there is brilliance scattered throughout (Tom Hanks's performance is an under-appreciated gem that really ties the whole thing together), but the screenplay is so unbearably rickety and belabors the point so agonizingly that it's a wonder that Spielberg was able to elicit the powerful moments that he did. Band of Brothers does a far superior job of going over similar territory without wallowing in schmaltz.

The Thin Red Line is the second-best movie ever made. It is unimpeachably flawless. Even some of the "plot holes" like having the shotgun-toting soldier randomly crop up in the bunker siege despite not being one of the men selected (in the script, the first bunker assault fails and they go back the next day with this guy; Malick stitched the two assaults together in the final cut) manage to add to the frenzy and confusion of war. Ryan, by contrast, has some plot holes that can't quite be papered over because it feels almost lazy (i.e. the references to the squad leaving 88mm guns for the air force, which calls back to a scene in the script that was never shot).

In essence, I could write essays about why Ryan has one of the strongest opening sequences of all time but peters out into a second-rate John Wayne flick by the end, whereas The Thin Red Line evokes the very best of human understanding about the very worst of human endeavor.

The Thin Red Line but it's close.