Short comings?

Rating: Null/10 (11 February 1999)

Saving Private Ryan is one of the most talked and written about movies of the last decade, and I felt I had to share with the world what I think about this motion picture.
Let me start by telling you that, from the moment I left the theatre, I knew that this movie would haunt me for some time and I was right. Steven Spielberg has really pushed the envelope of film-making for the years to come. With a style and courage which is becoming his trade-mark (who else had the guts to make a disaster movie about a seven foot fish or shoot a big studio production in black and white?)
The opening scene is often called brilliant but had little to do with the rest of the movie. I believe those 24 minutes were as essential to the movie as sound is. Those 24 minutes showed us that the men who surrvived that torment to tell the rest of the story, could only do so not because they where brave, or skilled, but because they where plain lucky. Every single scene after that sequence was covered with a blanket of dreadfulness, never to be sure who`s next.
Then the story about the men. To some, they weren't very convincing. I believe that they were supported with enough information to give an audience with a bit of imagination the tools to fill-in the blanks. It`s not King Lear we are looking at but regular joes, the kind you would sit next to on a bus and never care to notice, as in fact the same kind of people who saved my country. That`s why I don`t have a problem with the American flag waving at the closing scene. It`s not a patriotic gesture, but a pale witness of unnecessary loss of good men, men like our grandfathers, fathers and brothers.