War is Hell

Rating: Null/10 (11 July 2001)

I find some of the comments that SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is another gung-ho patriotic John Wayne-type propaganda movie just a little bit laughable. This is NOT a John Wayne-type my-country-right-or-wrong tract, and director Steven Spielberg has seen to that. True, Spielberg never fired a shot in anger--but then neither did the Duke!
The whole idea is that war is Hell. This is true the moment the characters played by Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore and others set foot on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 and encounter massive German resistance in one of the most graphic and violent sequences ever captured on film, one that lasts a good twenty-five minutes. The film then proceeds on as Hanks and his platoon are assigned to find a Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) who has lost three brothers in other theaters of World War II, and who is believed to have parachuted down behind enemy lines before the D-Day invasion.
What Spielberg has done is very much in the tradition of Oliver Stone's PLATOON and Stanley Kubrick's FULL METAL JACKET, though in an obviously less iconoclastic fashion. He has shown how war can bring out the best and the worst in the men who have to fight it. Granted Spielberg's setting is World War II while Stone's and Kubrick's were Vietnam, but the feeling is the same. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was well-deserving of the Oscars it received, and, like its two Vietnam counterparts, gave me a greater appreciation for what men who must fight these horrible wars, regardless of nationality, go through. 10/10 rating.