an utterly commendable and harrowing portrait of the nature of war and one of the most important films of the 20th century

Rating: 10/10 (17 November 2009)

From the opening notes of John Williams' somber and tear-jerking music score, followed by an old man wandering sadly through a World War II cemetery, and then to the deservedly infamous twenty-minute recreation of the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, and straight through to the end of the picture, it's adamantly clear that Steven Spielberg's epic masterpiece "Saving Private Ryan" is not just another war film on the shelves in the history of cinema. Coupled with Oliver Stone's "Platoon", this is perhaps the single greatest cinematic take on the nature of war ever made.
Based on a true story, "Saving Private Ryan" stars Tom Hanks as a World War II squad captain who is given the treacherous assignment to take seven other soldiers and go behind enemy lines in search of a missing paratrooper named Ryan whose brothers have been killed in action. And as noble as a mission as that sounds, the reaction from the soldiers is exactly what it would be in real life: we'll obey our orders, but is one man worth risking the lives of eight? That's the spirit of "Saving Private Ryan" and that's the spirit of war itself. Gone are the days where war was portrayed as like some kind of an end-of-season tournament and when soldiers were portrayed as being like a rowdy and pretentious baseball team on their great skirmish. Instead of glamorizing violence and giving us all-American heroes, "Saving Private Ryan" depicts war as what it is: a harrowing, traumatizing, unforgettably bad, soul-corrupting experience. The effect war and violence has on people is personified perfectly in a line given by Hanks about halfway through the film: "For every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel." The movie opens up with a twenty-minute battle sequence of which the likes have never been on the screen. We don't just see people being shot to death, we see explosions that send mutilated bodies flinging through the air, we see soldiers lying on the ground mortally wounded, spending their last breaths crying for their mothers and wanting to go home, and the Atlantic shoreline becomes red with blood. There is nothing glamorous or exciting about a scene like this. Rather, the reaction the audience gives is hung jaws, wide eyes, and a new appreciation for what our soldiers did in the call of duty and how lucky any of them were to live to see home again.
Another strength of the movie is that it does not only depict war as being horrifying, but it also makes neither heroes out of its protagonists or personifications of evil out of the enemy. As I mentioned earlier, the soldiers led by Tom Hanks are not cheerful, joke-throwing boys. They are cynical, rundown, exhausted, and pessimistic who spend a great deal of their time not charging out into enemy fire and dying in the blaze of glory, but cowering behind rubble. And that's the exact same of the German soldiers portrayed in the film. After all, they were drafted into a war as well. If it were not for the war, these men killing each other may have otherwise been best friends. In a way, the movie is not about the mission to rescue Private Ryan who is neither seen nor heard until well into the movie's running time, but about the very experience of trying to survive just one day through a war.
"Saving Private Ryan" is not only a technical triumph, but an intellectual one as well. Apart from showing us what war is really like and the effect it really has one people and nations, the movie creates three-dimensional human beings out of its characters, the story is very well-constructed, the dialogue by screenwriter Robert Rodat is first-class, and the acting, of course, top-notch. The combination of these elements gives us a representation of war that we can believe. Now when people think of war, they think of men lying on the ground dying and not grinning heroes dodging bullets as if life or death is merely a video game and they can try again if they fail the first time.
This is one of Steven Spielberg's very best films. It ranks up with films such as "Jaws", "Schindler's List", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" as some of the greatest and most important films ever made. Now "Saving Private Ryan" may be too gritty and vulgar for the tastes of some people, but I think it should be required viewing for anybody going into the service or even thinking of the like. Because war is not a baseball game. And it's not something anybody wants to experience more than once, if at all.