Brilliant movie even if too violent

Rating: 7/10 (4 January 2009)

I've just seen Saving Private Ryan for the first time and, as occurs when I first see a film, I quickly check IMDb to see what the Haters and Lovers of the movie say in their reviews.
First, the Haters.
Any time any movie portrays America as savior of Europe in World War II, the result gets panned by these groups (and if they're not yet organized, they should be as they deserve each other): (1) America haters from any country, notably (a) Germany ("we weren't ALL bad") or (b) the UK ("we carried the burden until the tardy self-interested Yanks decided to enter war, which by the way was almost won when the US came in"), and (2) hard leftists everywhere (how the left is anywhere entitled to credibility is utterly beyond me).
Hey Germany! You WERE bad! Hitler was constitutionally elected and brought to power by the German electorate, only too happy to see the Jew (and the occasional Bolshevik) blamed for everything afflicting Weimar Germany.
Hey UK! We love you, but sometimes your hard right and hard left are hard to stomach. Pssst! You, our British cousins, had LOST the war by 1941. It was over, ended, caput, stick-a-fork-in-em done. Winston well knew how critical it was that America enter the war - which it did, and which it won.
We are delighted that winning the war was largely an effort of the English-speaking world, but it was the English-speaking world's largest country that led the way, turned the tide and won the war. Stop with the idiosyncratic reasons why, exactly, the US simply joined an already successful enterprise. She didn't. Britain was sunk and defeated, with precious little industrial capacity left - industrial might had to come from the US and Canada, but mostly the US.
Saving Private Ryan isn't "propaganda" - it contains critical truths, and sometimes truth makes for excellent propaganda.