Product Description

Contains: *Thin Red Line, The *Tora! Tora! Tora! *Patton *Longest Day, The

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45428 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-11-07
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Black & White, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 4
• Running time: 673 minutes

Amazon.com
The Thin Red Line (1998)
In recluse director Terrence Malick's 1998 comeback vehicle, the battle for Guadalcanal Island offers an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure philosophical noodling. This is not especially an actors' movie, but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private (newcomer Jim Caviezel). In some ways The Thin Red Line seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete, yet it casts a spell like almost nothing else of its time, and Malick's visionary images are a challenge and a signpost to the rest of his filmmaking generation. --Robert Horton

Tora! Tora! Tora!
"Sir, there's a large formation of planes coming in from the north, 140 miles, 3 degrees east." "Yeah? Don't worry about it." This is just one of the many mishaps chronicled in Tora! Tora! Tora! The epic film shows the bombing of Pearl Harbor from both sides in the historic first American-Japanese coproduction: American director Richard Fleischer oversaw the complicated production, wrestling a sprawling story with dozens of characters into a manageable, fairly easy-to-follow film. While Tora! Tora! Tora! lacks the strong central characters that anchor the best war movies, the real star of the film is the climactic 30-minute battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering that expertly conveys the surprise, the chaos, and the immense destruction of the attack. --Sean Axmaker

Patton
One of the greatest screen biographies ever produced, this monumental film runs nearly three hours, won seven Academy Awards, and gave George C. Scott the greatest role of his career. Scott embodies his role so fully, so convincingly, that we can't help but be drawn to and fascinated by Patton as a man who is simultaneously bound for hell and glory. Filmed on an epic scale at literally dozens of European locations, Patton does not embrace war as a noble pursuit, nor does it deny the reality of war as a breeding ground for heroes. Through the awesome achievement of Scott's performance and the film's grand ambition, Patton shows all the complexities of a man who accepted his role in life and (like Scott) played it to the hilt. --Jeff Shannon

The Longest Day
The Longest Day is Hollywood's definitive D-day movie. More modern accounts such as Saving Private Ryan are more vividly realistic, but producer Darryl F. Zanuck's epic 1962 account is the only one to attempt the daunting task of covering that fateful day from all perspectives. From the German high command and front-line officers to the French Resistance and all the key Allied participants, the screenplay by Cornelius Ryan, based on his own authoritative book, is as factually accurate as possible. The endless parade of stars (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton, to name a few) makes for an uneasy mix of verisimilitude and Hollywood star-power, however, and the film falls a little flat for too much of its three-hour running time. But the set-piece battles are still spectacular, and if the landings on Omaha Beach lack the graphic gore of Private Ryan, they nonetheless show the sheer scale and audacity of the invasion. --Mark Walker

Customer Reviews

I'll tell you why...
To answer another reviewer's question: Why would you buy this set when you can get the individual films cheaper? You can't buy the individual films cheaper.

The version of "Patton" in this set is the 2-disc Special Edition, which is out of print except for in this set, and selling for more than the price of this entire set on auction sites.

So save some money, get the 2-disc version of Patton, and get three other great WWII films for free (essentially).

Good package of war movies
The Longest Day is one of the best war movies ever made. And Tora 3 is a much better depiction of the attack on Pearl Harbor than that stupid Ben Affleck movie.

The Thin Red Line can be a tough one to accept. I had to watch it a few times before I liked it.

Nice box, but why?
The three older movies in this set are undeniably among the better "traditional" movies about World War II. "The Thin Red Line" may not belong in the same set (given its recent origin and approach to war) but it, too, is a movie with merit. My only question about this set is why would you buy them together when they are cheaper to buy if you purchase them separately? Is that slipcase worth the extra bucks? You decide.