Wrenching at times, but not the greatest

Rating: Null/10 (13 November 2001)

"POSSIBLE SPOILER"
This is a good movie with good performances and superb production values, but hardly the "best war movie of all time". Some scenes deserve notice, however, as truly devastating movie work. And one connecting scene still confuses me.
The opening leaves us with, what we will learn later, Ryan as a grandfather many years later visiting the cemetary in Normandy. He is kneeling by a tombstone in tears with his family around him. At the end of the movie, we return to see Ryan now at what seems to be a different part of the cemetary with his family in the distance. His wife comes over and he says tearfully "Am I a good man?" (Referring to the sacrifice others made to save his life). Well, I thought, he should have figured that out by now. Manipulative and cloying, I thought. Then he stands straight, comes to attention, and I think to myself "Oh, no. Don't salute. It's too obvious. Please don't salute. Don't do it". He salutes.
The twenty minutes devoted to the Omaha Beach landing are surely the most gruesome, bloodiest twenty minutes ever put on screen. Spielberg captured the horrible reality of war. Bodies are cut in half, limbs are severed, young dying soldiers cry for "Mama". This is what is was REALLY like - not a thing was sanitized here. You have to be emotionally dead not to be affected by what those brave men did at that beach, and what they suffered. And by extension, all the men and women who have died in all wars.

For me, the most devastating scene was the little girl being passed down by her father to the well-meaning soldier, both somehow trying to get her to safety. The soldier is killed, and the little girl scrambles over the rubble to get back to her father. Her father lifts her back up, but she stays an arm's length away, crying uncontrollably, the father trying to draw her to him. She is crying and screaming, and then slaps her father hard in the face. Still crying and yelling at him, she slaps him again. For her, it was the ultimate, unforgiveable sin. For him, he was trying to save her life. But war destroyed this most indestructible bond imaginable between a father and his trusting little girl. This was the greatest horror of the movie.