Is the mission really one man.

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 1998)

For most of us, fortunate to have only read about, and not experienced, the kind of action portrayed in "Saving Private Ryan", that portrayal accomplishes complete suspension of disbelief, and leaves us completely exhausted by its end. The only other film of its genre that has the same effect is Wolfgang Petersen's "Das Boot".
If the viewers draw moral conclusions strictly from the material Spielberg provides, many if not most will conclude that making war should NEVER be an option. Of course, Spielberg scrupulously avoids any explanation for the presence and actions of Captain Miller's men other than rescuing this one man. This is in contrast to "Schindler's List", which is a continuous justification for using whatever force is necessary to liberate the innocent and punish the guilty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, "Schindler's List" liberates the innocent without any evidence of men like Captain Miller, his squad, or the millions of other GIs that made it possible.
How could Spielberg, if he wanted to, have combined the two, giving the viewer a sense of the reaction of those occupied by the Nazis to the Allied landings, yet not completely switch the film out of context?
Consider the film "Playing for Time". This TV film, released approximately ten years ago, achieved extreme notoriety even before its release by virtue of its central casting of Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave's extreme political left wing views are regrettably, considering her occupation, tainted with a devotion to the cause of Palestinian statehood. She played a Jewish woman in a Nazi labor camp. The film recounts the "real world" assembly of musically talented female inmates, who form a small orchestra and perform for the camp Nazis. As long as they played, they gained time. The continuous horror of "life" in a labor camp is interrupted very briefly when, just before the start of a concert, a male technician arranges something on stage in front of Ms. Redgrave, and opens his palm to her sight. On the skin is written "Allies landing in France". He closes his palm and goes on with his work. Redgrave gives the slightest of all smiles, but one which the viewer understands is a shout of joy. It will be over. Survival is possible.
This is not a scene Spielberg considered necessary in "Schindler's List".
Chester Wilmot's "The Struggle For Europe" describes an event he witnessed during the liberation of Brussels. He writes "In one square the [British] tanks were halted by the [Belgian civilian] throng and the Brussels police attempted to move the crowd back, but they could not restrain one little old woman who wore on her drab black dress her husband's medals from another war. She made a quick dart across to the nearest jeep, took the hand of the driver, kissed it, and said, 'Je vous remercie, Tommie. Je vous remercie.' And into his hand she pressed what was obviously all that she had -- three cigarettes."
This is not a scene Spielberg considered necessary in "Saving Private Ryan".
I am extremely fortunate to have a father who was a Normandy to Berlin GI, and a mother who was a Belgian native, lived under the Nazi occupation, and could very well have been in that Brussels crowd that day. Through their eyes I saw as much as anyone could second hand. This is not a luxury available to many people today. The WW2 generation is dying, and they are dying with the knowledge of what happened, why it happened, and how to avoid having it happen again. Spielberg has the responsibility to pass that information on, and in that respect, both "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" are failures.