Less to it than meets the eye.

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 1998)

Spielberg has, without doubt, an extraordinary talent to put together images and visual structure in a film. Unfortunately, the same cannot always be said of his ability to develop character or present the complexities of human chaos. SPR attacks the senses with a stunning opening sequence that conveys the noise and confusion of battle, but as soon as the film has to concentrate on the characters, and their motivations, it sinks into a grossly jingoistic and sentimentalised version of history in which every company in the American Army is made up of a representative of each personality type, America saves the free world (three cheers from the ever grateful British, French, Dutch etc etc and where were the civilians in all of this) and the enemy (the Germans) are barely one-dimensional caricatures of monsters and bufoons (they are so much the Other that the battle tanks resemble flying saucers from a 1950s Sci-fi cartoon) .Remember that a good old GI sock can beat the might of German demonic technology. We even have the Cavalry (in this case, the airstrike) coming to the rescue in the final reel.
Have we grown up at all ? It would appear not. Maybe Spielberg just can't help himself, but to regard this as anything more than a hopelessly naive, patronising and ill-considered attempt to present "War as the true Measure of a Man" (not women you may note) is to be blind to the world outside Norman Rockwell, Apple Pie and the Great American Dream.
What is most distressing is that Spielberg has the eye and ear of (perhaps) millions of people, and they may come away believing that this is history (because of the apparent verisimilitude of the battle scenes in particular).
This fundamentally flawed film flatters to deceive. There is less to it than meets the eye.