Telling a fictionalized version of the Battle of Mount Austen, which was part of the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War, it portrays U.S. soldiers of C Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, played by Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, and Ben Chaplin.

Critics gave it a positive reception, praising it for its philosophical depiction of war, Malick's direction, musical score, cinematography, screenplay, editing, and performances of the cast.

Furious at Staros's refusal to obey his command, Tall ventures up to Charlie Company's position, accompanied by his battalion executive officer, Captain John Gaff.

After being advised of Bell's reconnaissance of the Japanese position, Tall suggests a small detachment of men to perform a flanking maneuver on the bunker to capture it.

While the company is bivouacked, Staros is relieved of his command by Tall, who deems him too soft for the pressures of combat and suggests that he apply for reassignment and become a lawyer in the JAG Corps in Washington, D.C. During this time, Bell receives a letter from his wife, informing him that she has fallen in love with another man and seeks a divorce.

In 1988, Geisler and John Roberdeau met with Malick in Paris about writing and directing a movie based on D. M. Thomas' 1981 novel The White Hotel.

[5]Malick spent years working on other projects, including a stage production of Sansho the Bailiff and a script known as The English-Speaker, spending $2 million of the producers' money, half of which for writing.

[5] According to an article in Entertainment Weekly, the producers gained Malick's confidence by "catering to his every whim,"[8] providing him with obscure research material, including a book titled Reptiles and Amphibians of Australia, an audiotape of Kodō's Heartbeat Drummers of Japan, information on the Navajo code talkers recruited by the United States Marine Corps, making his travel plans, and helping the director and his wife Michele get a mortgage for their Paris apartment.

They approached Malick's former agent, Mike Medavoy, who was setting up his own production company, Phoenix Pictures, and he agreed to give them $100,000 to start work on The Thin Red Line.

[5] Medavoy had a deal with Sony Pictures and Malick began scouting locations in Panama and Costa Rica before settling on the rain forests of northern Australia.

[10] In April 1997, three months before filming, Sony pulled the plug while crews were building the sets in Queensland, because new studio chairman John Calley did not think Malick could make his movie with the proposed $52 million budget.

In 1995, once word went out that Malick was making another movie after many years, numerous actors approached him, flooding the casting directors until they had to announce they wouldn't be accepting more requests.

At Medavoy's home in 1995, Malick staged a reading with Martin Sheen delivering the screen directions, and Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Peter Berg, Lukas Haas, and Dermot Mulroney playing the main roles.

[5] In June of that year, a five-day workshop was scheduled at Medavoy's with Pitt dropping by, and culminating with Malick putting on the soundtrack of Where Eagles Dare and playing Japanese taiko drums.

Others followed, including William Baldwin, Edward Burns, Josh Hartnett, Crispin Glover, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stephen Dorff, and Leonardo DiCaprio; the last of these flew up from the Mexico set of Romeo + Juliet to meet Malick at the American Airlines lounge in the Austin airport.

Tom Sizemore, however, was offered a more substantial role in Saving Private Ryan and, when he could not contact Malick for several days, decided to do Steven Spielberg's film instead.

They scouted the historic battlefields on Guadalcanal and shot footage, but health concerns over malaria limited filming to daylight hours only.

Malick's unconventional filming techniques included shooting part of a scene during a bright, sunny morning only to finish it weeks later at sunset.

[17] After principal photography wrapped, she came back with a five-hour first cut and spent seven months editing, with Thornton contributing three hours of narrative voice-over material.

[20] After Geisler and Roberdeau told their story to Vanity Fair magazine, Medavoy's attorneys declared them in breach of contract and threatened to remove their names from the film unless they agreed to do no future interviews until after the Academy Awards.

Among the music not written by Zimmer which appears in the film is In Paradisum from Requiem by Gabriel Fauré and the opening minutes of The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives.

The website's critical consensus reads, "The Thin Red Line is a daringly philosophical World War II film with an enormous cast of eager stars.

[26] Gene Siskel described The Thin Red Line as the "finest contemporary war film I've seen, supplanting Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan from earlier this year, or even Oliver Stone's Platoon from 1986.

Actors like Sean Penn, John Cusack, Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin find the perfect tone for scenes of a few seconds or a minute, and then are dropped before a rhythm can be established.

[29][better source needed] Michael O'Sullivan of The Washington Post wrote, "The Thin Red Line is a movie about creation growing out of destruction, about love where you'd least expect to find it and about angels – especially the fallen kind – who just happen to be men.

"[30] Andrew Johnston of Time Out New York wrote: "Like Malick's previous efforts – Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) – Line is a film of incredible beauty.

"[31] Owen Gleiberman gave the film a "B−" in his review for Entertainment Weekly and wrote, "The Thin Red Line could, I think, turn out to be this season's Beloved, a movie too paralyzingly high-minded to connect with audiences.

"[32] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it "intermittently brilliant" and wrote, "The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been.

"[33] In a special episode of Siskel and Ebert, guest host Martin Scorsese selected The Thin Red Line as the second best film of the 1990s behind The Horse Thief.

[60] On September 28, 2010, The Criterion Collection released a special edition of The Thin Red Line on DVD and Blu-ray with a new, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised and approved by Terrence Malick and cinematographer John Toll.