This is truly a great movie. This is another movie in the category of 'if you haven't seen it, what's wrong with you'. I'd like to break the review down into two categories, technical and story.
First the technical which is unbelievably good. The movie opens with the D-Day invasion and it's shocking in brutality. Vetrans groups hailed it as the most realistic approximation they'd ever seen. It's very difficult to watch but even harder to turn away. German machine guns make hamburger of allied troops as they leave the troop ships. One scene has a medic valiantly stop one soldiers bleeding only to have the victim take a shot to the head. Death sweeps up and down the beach. The opening half hour of this movie shows the incredible amount of respect we owe to those who risk our lives for us. (Belated Vetran's Day thanks!)
The movie is shot with a bleached out look that is very appealing. The destroyed French villages are amazing to look at. Spielberg has amazing technical chops and he shows them well here. He also has a penchant for creating tense situations. The movie involves several seperate occasions where the audience gets sucked in.
Ok, now the underlying story. Earlier this year, I read the only negative review I'd ever seen about SPR. It was written by Mark Steyn. Try as I might I haven't been able to track it down. The best I could find is an extended entry in this post. (The entire post is worth reading.) Here's Steyn:
Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'.
And he's right. That part of the movie completely slipped by me. And it's kind of an important point. In some sense, this movie asks 'why do we fight?'. Hanks offers up a calculus about saving the most lives. The idea of risking the lives of 10 men to save the life of one particular one seems deranged to him. But if it gets him closer to home, then he's all for it. More from Steyn (found here):
He was the youngest of three brothers. The war ended for his older siblings when they were blown up, returning home with only one functioning leg between the two of them, while he made it back with both still working. If you gave that scenario to Steven Spielberg, he'd go off and make Saving Private Ryan's Legs. But what we Boomers, Gen Xers and all the rest can never understand is the quiet, routine acceptance of personal sacrifice -- the fact that you can be crippled, your life shattered, your prospects shriveled, and that it's OK, it was still the necessary thing to do. That's why every old soldier I've ever spoken to considers the premise of Spielberg's movie laughable. He can recreate everything about the look of a war -- the explosions, the severed arteries, the ketchup -- and miss entirely its pulse. Saving Private Ryan is a "realistic" war movie, only if you don't mind every character thinking in a wholly Oprahfied way.
And I think there's some truth in that. Which is a shame. The closest this movie comes to a beliveable reason for why soldiers go into danger is because of the bond of their mates. Early in the movie the squad's sniper (Barry Pepper) suggests that if he can get a clear shot at Hitler, they can all go home. Instead of agreement, there's kind of an embarassed silence that seems very modern. Too modern.
Still a great movie, but it does have it's flaws.
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