Saving Private Ryan
Director:Steven Spielberg
Screenplay:Robert Rodat
Starring:Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon, Ted Danson, Jeremy
Davies and Edward Burns
John's Review
��� As far as war films go, this is the end-all,
be-all of movies. What struck me at first was the sheer horror that something so atrocious
could be so commonplace in our world today. The film opens with a flashback to World War
II, specifically D-Day, Omaha Beach. (The entire movie takes place during W.W.II, except
for the opening and very end of the film, which are used merely as reference.)
��� From the opening moments, the anxiety and fiercely
discomforting conditions are underlined, and as soon as the gate opens, the German
artillery comes raining down. As the doors to the troop transports open, the men are mowed
down as if they were nothing more than department store mannequins. Spielberg has shot it
with hand-held cameras and it plays without music. Instead, the soundtrack consists of the
sounds of explosions, mortar shots and the screams, pleas and prayers of dying and
mutilated soldiers. The first 24 minutes are certainly not for the faint at-heart.
��� The soldiers pray, they shake with fear, they scream in rage
and, dying, they cry out for their mothers. As a kind of eulogy, the camera slowly scans across bodies bobbing in the blood red surf,
amid dead fish. But after painstakingly taking the beach, Capt. John Miller (Hanks),
doesn't even have time to stop for a smoke, as he is given new orders. You see, the third
of four brothers was killed in the landing on D-Day. The U.S. Army high command is not
about to let the fourth and final brother die as well. (In 1942, during the battle of
Guadalcanal, the five Sullivan brothers were killed when their ship the USS Juneau was
torpedoed. After that, it was forbidden for members of a family to serve in the same
troop.)
��� After taking on a skinny, timid translator (Davies), Miller and
his squad head inland to find Private Ryan (Damon) who parachuted in the night before and
was apparently lost. Before the ethical questions even begin we are thrust into more
gruesome events, during which a member of squad is brutally killed. Here starts the
questions of why risk a squad of men for just one man? Even if he is his mother's last
son? Such attempts at these morals and ethics are successful in raising some questions
that aren�t often considered these days, but they still don�t begin to lend the
film the kind of weight intellectually that would match the action sequences. �
��� In one of the most tearful death scenes I have ever
encountered, a soldier's life is seeping out of him as his buddies keep up a line of
chatter. "Tell us what to do," one of them calmly asks the fatally wounded man
-- their medic -- to distract him. "Tell us how to fix you." In still another
scene a soldier begs to stop fighting as a German soldier slowly plunges a knife into his
chest and shushes him like a child. At every level, this is moviemaking at its finest and
most sincere.
��� The almost ironic ending to the film only intensifies the movie's
message of brutality and darkness that is etched into the human soul. Spielberg has
created a viscreal landscape filled with carnage, despair, loathing and an almost surreal
surrounding in the beautiful French backdrop. He has coaxed exceptional, nuanced
performances from every one in his cast. The acting is as brutally realistic as the battle
scenes themselves and that is why the film has as much heart as it has insight.
��� Saving Private Ryan is the best film of 90's and one of the
best films of all time.
Grade: A+
