Terrifying and emotionally draining piece which places the viewer at the forefront of chaos, angst and deliberation in 1944 France.

Rating: 10/10 (1 February 2010)

Saving Private Ryan is Spielberg's anti-thesis to the action movie, indeed the blockbuster ideology. From the man who made his name, indeed inspired a entire movement if you'd like to label the blockbuster so, in making 1975's Jaws; a film that skipped along the boundaries of comedy, horror and sheer action driven spectacle, comes a film that combines the latter two of those three and approaches them from a completely different angle. Whilst Spielberg-helmed; starring functional, friendly, relaxed and 'accessable' lead Tom Hanks; released in the summer month of July in America, but getting a more realised winter period release everywhere else and very much arriving as a genre film, Saving Private Ryan is anything but the usual summertime-Spielberg-Hanks led flick, instead turning a entire 'promise' into a thing of pure terror. In a summer that saw Deep Impact, Armeggeddon and Godzilla released in close proximity, Saving Private Ryan must have been quite the jolt.
People have written in the past about the degrees of sentimentality and the nuisance to do with the unreliable narrator. I think it's impossible to look, or even think, back to the times of The Second World War without a sense of sentimentality. The notes that accompany the DVD state that Spielberg attempted to get across that orally guided sense of the father telling the child, ie; his father informing him of the horrors of the war. Such an approach, to some, might sound a little convention, indeed like a cliché, or something that contains a degree of sentimentality. Essentially, this is exactly what Spielberg does in Saving Private Ryan; he doesn't trivialise in rendering it TV movie of the week built around some harsh battle scenes, he delivers on a true-to-life narrative as told through the perspective of someone who wasn't there but is aware of the horrors, much in the way anybody born post WWII might attempt to re-imagine what it must have been like to fight under certain conditions.
The film is, in fact, delivered by way of a flashback – a delving into the past a specific soldier does in order so that we may relive what occurred over the space of half a dozen or so days, echoing Spielberg's own relation to the war stories of old by way of his father. The film is about unity; teamwork and the risk of sacrifice those undertake for individuals they are yet to meet, for the platoon in Saving Private Ryan it is an individual they know is out there but in the grander scale of things, it is for people spanning a number of generations across a number of nations they will certainly never encounter.
Following the flashback, Spielberg provides us with a few seconds of calm before the storm in the form of waves lapping up on a beach. The place is northern France, the event is D-Day in 1944. Much has been written about the landings, going into them would only repeat what has been said but it's worth noting that the first lines anybody ever says once all the vomiting and praying in the landing crafts has stopped arrives in the form of a load of military directions and ramblings which the viewer might not properly hear, enhancing confusion and a sense of disorientation just prior to the drawn out sequence of carnage. With this, and as pointed out in a review in a publication, the casting of Hanks as Captain John Miller gives the audience something to map onto amidst the chaos, as actors that do not carry similar weight to Hanks are either blown apart around him or placed in this Hellish cauldron. However, years later the likes of Pepper; Burns and Diesel have since established themselves as names and face thus threatening to dampen the intended purpose of anonymity Spielberg meant. Viewing it recently, I do not feel any of the impact is particularly lost.
Their eventual mission to seek out the Private Ryan of the title, a certain Matt Damon, who's located somewhere pretty deep within northern France; deep enough so that the march there will last half a dozen or so days march for the troops. Miller's platoon is made up of the guys that survived with him on the beaches of D-Day plus a certain Private by name of Upham, a trilingual troop played by Jeremy Davies who does his usual scrawny; softly spoken; seemingly untrustworthy and somewhat ill-at-ease-with-everyone-else act which was fresher back then than it is now. Miller's professionalism is only enforced by talk of a highly dangerous, off screen mission he undertook; one that saw him and his crew knock out a number of German anti-air craft guns. Dennis Farina's somewhat impressed and therefore transfixed gaze locks onto a talking Miller, as the emphasis in his character's superiority in military activity is encored. He and his platoon's journey is punctuated by interactions with French families; German snipers; machine gun nests and conflicts with each other as they go in search.
To say the film concludes with an almighty shoot-out between two sides in a bombed out and long since deserted French town, would be grossly misleading. In a sense, an action film might very well 'build' to an explosive and dramatic set piece but while Saving Private Ryan might conform to a series of heroic actions, followed by a twist in fate just as a fatal blow is about to be struck to whom we think is the 'lead', the lingering feeling is on the sense of loss more-so spectacle. One might argue the sequence comes across as more stark and more frightening than the opening beach landings simply because of the presence of the reason the platoon are even there; the fear of loss of life comes across as more prominent in a film that has thus far displayed a massive amount of loss. The film is a towering achievement, and one of the better films out of the decade that-was the 1990s.