A Spielberg fantasy done horribly right.

Rating: 10/10 (1 January 2011)

What if the United States Military actually possessed a shred of decency and humanity? Shyeh! What if.
In SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the people who type the "Sorry Your Son's Dead" letters for the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die notice that three letters are addressed to the Ryan family of Anytown USA. Seems three brothers have been killed in the name of assuaging the small-penis insecurities of the American government. There is one more Ryan boy presumably still alive, and the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die now send America's Favorite Son, Tom Hanks, to snatch the last Ryan from the belly of the beast, intending to send him home honorably. Shyeh! What if.
Steven Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is the war movie by which all other war movies will be measured - not for its implausible premise (written by Robert Rodat) and typical propagandistic slant, but for its revolutionary depiction of battle scenes, more brutal than any ever committed to film. Visceral. Nightmarish. Incendiary. Words cannot do justice to the ferocious spectacle and gutshock aftertaste of the opening Normandy invasion.
We meet the Yanks stepping onto the beach at Omaha, the sea more blood than brine, in a frontal assault on the Normandy coast that is going horribly wrong, as the German fortifications on the shoreline mow them down ruthlessly. Steel crossbeam obstacles called "hedgehogs" stick nefariously up from the sand in the low tide; planted to mutilate the undersides of boats as they attain the shore - if the tide had kept the hedgehogs hidden underwater - now they ironically provide the only cover for the American troops in a searing firestorm.
During this blood and bone tempest we meet Captain John Hiller (Tom Hanks) trying to stay alive yet move his troops closer to the German machine gun nests and take them out. We are in the crucified heart of the battle, blood on the camera lens, rain dirt muddying the view, machine gun rounds slamming and pinging past like fireballs, gray-green desaturated filmstock and a kind of lens flare sheen around the film edges; internal body parts, severed limbs, ear-numbing explosions; a grimy, hellish, embracing maelstrom of frenzied death.
Spielberg and longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski capture what has never been captured in depictions of battle - desperation, futility, the overwhelming randomness of slugs whizzing by and claiming lives, medics wasting morphine stabs on dying soldiers; confusion and screaming, bodily fluids and exit wounds, intestines mixing with mud - simply the most authentic Cinematic War we have ever seen.
Hiller's mission to Save Private Ryan is painted as a spark of humanity illuminating the gross inhumanity of war. YET. The high command's decision to send a son home to his grieving mother can only be for one reason - not moral, ethical or humane - to make a future politician look golden.
Hiller's ragtag squad consists of Tom Sizemore (scrappy adjutant) Edward Burns (cynic looker), Giovanni Ribisi (the doc), Barry Pepper (holy sharpshooter), Adam Goldberg (resident Jew), Vin Diesel (goombah muscle), and Jeremy Davies (scaredy cat Upham). And each man is created whole, as we discover whenever "characterization" sets in during quiet time.
Captain Hiller feels every bladed inch of the Shakespeare axiom, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" (Henry IV). He is the victim of one bad decision after anther, not all his fault, but for his shoulders alone to bear. Each man who dies under his command takes him "one step farther from home."
When Hiller's troop finds private James Ryan - he is Matt Damon, acting the hell out of the Concerned Face chapter of the Acting for Male Models handbook.
To climax the movie - another skin-searing battle sequence. Spielberg is now just having the time of his life: his crew have the formula down and we are once again struck speechless by the construction of the on screen blitzkrieg that makes all other skirmishes on film look like Monty Python's Batley Townswomens' Guild Battle of Pearl Harbor.
Chilling - as Goldberg's Jew struggles with a German and is stabbed slowly, deliberately; regretful - as Davies's scaredy-cat Upham could've stopped the stabbing if he had just had the guts to run up a stairway instead of tearfully ascending in fear; twisted - as Pepper's holy sharpshooter prays while he snipes that his lord keep his hand steady and his eye keen, "You are my tower, you are my shield" (which should be a morbid contradiction for Christians, that they will instead find reassuring - that "god" is supposedly on their side); disturbing - when Ribisi's doc is mortally wounded and he stutters instructions on how to "operate" on him, even as his liver is mutilated and the last of the morphine is stabbed into his leg as he expires; amusing - as Sizemore is shot and is madder at his gun jamming than at being shot; ultimately tragic - as Hiller's dying words to Ryan convey his confidence in the unproven worth of humankind, and a simultaneous indictment that Ryan could never hope to live up to: "Earn this!... Earn it."
For closure, a general narrates a letter written by the People Who Send Sons Off To Die, to Ryan's mother on how the army is soooo generous for sending James Ryan home, misusing Lincoln's words about her other sons being sacrificed on the "altar of freedom" and making our flesh crawl with platitudes, euphemisms and shallow commiserations.
Just think, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had kept his promise of keeping America out of foreign wars, instead of antagonizing Japan and then entering WWII, he could have saved not only private Ryan, but also the whole godforsaken American army, navy and air force.
But that would entail America actually possessing a shred of decency and humanity.
Shyeh! What if.