Excellent combat scenes - unrealistic dialogue

Rating: 7/10 (6 December 2006)

I wish I could view this movie like the average moviegoer. In that case, I would probably have given it higher marks. However, I was in the Army and know that dialogue such as is in this film would be highly unlikely, no, impossible, to have been said in real life.
The hierarchy in the service is very clear: privates do not contradict, interrupt, defy, or in any way address their superiors as is depicted in this film. I found a number of scenes to be pure Spielberg fantasy. The scene in which Hanks doesn't provide the full name of the 'Ryan' he is searching for, which results in Hanks delivering the wrong information to the wrong 'Ryan', is hard to swallow. The scene with Matt Damon protesting when told he is being taken off the front lines is also hard to believe.
The scene where Oppem (or whatever his name was) protests against shooting the POW is absurd. No way that would have ever happened. Some of the other unlikely aspects of the film: Tom Sizemore throws his .45 caliber pistol at the German; four soldiers pull the pins on their grenades and drop them in the tank turret, yet none of them detonate. The scene at the end when Tom Hanks starts firing at the tank with his .45. In real life, he would have been dead by then after being shot in the back with what amounts to a high powered rifle.
The scenes after the Germans bring their 20 mm. cannon into action also didn't get very far past the GI's first encounter with the fearsome weapon. After it annihilates about six or seven GIs from one short volley, one wonders why the Germans didn't make quick work of the rest of the GIs after that.
The dialogue was also a bit too pristine for my tastes. In reality, GIs curse up a storm. These guys were a wee bit too polite and wholesome. Platoon gave a much more accurate account of how GIs actually behave.
These criticisms aside, the action scenes are well staged and evoke a healthy pulse pounding for the viewer.