"Saving Private Ryan" is highly respectable on two accounts for me, it upheld the tradition of the Anti-war genre started by 1931's "All Quiet on the Western Front" by showing the brutality of war so badly that you lose your lunch. It also showed Spielberg had 'serious' film making in him after 1993's "Schindler's List."
The 3 hour epic begins at a graveyard for slain soldiers of WW2. An aged James Ryan visits old comrades with his family. Suddently he begins his 3 hour flashback.
We flash into one of the most horrific visions on film, an ultra violent remake of the invasion of Normandy;D-day. It is so graphic that reports of elder men watching the film in theatres left in utter reminiscent disgust. After the half hour battle, we slow down and are presented with most of the key characters, Capt. John Miller(Tom Hanks), who is recruited on a special mission. He is sent to lead a rescue mission for James Francis Ryan, an MIA who is thought to be the last surviving member of the Ryan clan. With three brothers all dead, it wouldnt look good for the US gov't to bring 4 brothers to their death. So the fourth is getting rescued and sent back home.
Accompanying Miller is a hardasz Brooklynite Private Reiben(Edward Burns), Sgt. Horvath(Tom Sizemore), medic Wade(Giovanni Ribisi), a war inexperienced translator(Jeremy Davies), among others. As they travel around the heart of Nazi occupied France, they encounter Nazi infested villages they help reclaim, visit other platoons , begin mutiny, and desperately struggle to survive nazis, fatigue, and each other, while trying to find one private in the US army.
After a long struggle, half of their men dead, much physical and pyschological abuse, they find Private Ryan, only to find that he now doesn't wanna leave his post with the only family he has left, his platoon. So now they declare if they want to leave himand turn back, a wasted mission or help Private Ryan and his platoon guard a bridge which is about to enter some graphically violent battle.
This film has much poetic violence; through many disturbing images of we realize the true nature and violence of war. Not only do we see the graphic portrayal of the physical breakdowns of the soldiers, we see the pyschological breakdowns of soldiers, many crying, many fallen down begging for their mother. There obviously was a great demand for a genius director to guide every single detail to the film, and Spielberg knew how to do it. The cinematography is as beautiful and eloquent as it is disturbing. The script is well done. The characters were all performed perfectly.
This film, however, is so violent,graphic,and disturbing, the only thing missing to make you puke your guts out is the smell of war. It's sketchy how the flashback idea works;I mean, here we have Private Ryan in his later years having an anecdote portraying EVERY SINGLE DETAIL of a story he only witnesses in the last like, forty minutes of the film? The only excuse for that would be if Private Reiebens had survived to tell him the story. Again, as the usual Spielberg flaw contains, the characters themselves, not the actors, all have some type of sketchy personality to them. Childlike almost, no one really goes into great depth.
Still, this is a great film. One of two anti-war films to be nominated for Best Picture in 1998(Along with "The Thin Red Line"), it won 5 Academy Awards, including the Directors Oscar for Spielberg. This is one of his best films, and shows that Spielberg is still capable of not only catching our attention but growing as a film maker.
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