A pile of corn

Rating: 3/10 (20 October 2007)

I successfully avoided this until seeing Band of Brothers, which raised my previously low interest in Spielberg productions; having seen one too many of his mawkish, sentimental pieces of malarkey. Instead, it turns out it was wise to skip this for almost a decade.
A troop that has just landed at Normandy is diverted to move 100m into France and find a single private whose value has just gone up. And sure... they walk the whole way (never even hitching a ride) They encounter provisioned troops every fifteen minutes along the way (any of which would have been more efficiently tasked with the mission.) and they find Ryan not alone & lost behind enemy-lines (maintaining radio silence, or in imminent danger); but amidst another platoon (also provisioned) and ready to take on a mission against 4 German tanks and about 80 Germans. Really... what a bunch of schlock!
Why do people make up stories to tell about WW2 to show their respect for those who fought it? Make up characters? Invent a phony mission that never occurred? What? ...the hundreds of thousands of personal stories that exist didn't have enough dramatic range? This is a brazen slap in the face to all who fought.
S.P.R. is just so much retrograde 1950's storytelling, and Spielberg doesn't have it in him to recognize cinematic cheese when he smells it. There's so much time for soldiers pouring out their hearts & having profound discussions that it's a wonder they even had time for a war. Spielberg is only a shade subtler than flashing subtitles every now and then that say, "CRY NOW!" and "WAVE THE FLAG!" I'm as susceptible as anyone to patriotism, but come on. The 3 stars I gave it are for the battle sequences. Every time the action slows & Spielberg needs to come up with something dramatic he delivers a pile of corn... and earns a barrel of lemons. Structurally this feels like a grab-bag of scenes made for an even longer movie. They find private Ryan almost effortlessly.
And what's with the all-star cast, Hanks, Giamatti, Diesel, Damon, Danson, Hines, Ribisi... I can't imagine any of these guys are WW2 figures because they're all so overexposed in the current timeframe.
I didn't need this giant pile of malarkey and all it's cheap sentiment to make me feel a debt to the Allies in WW2. I have reality to do that.