Cheap

Rating: 3/10 (24 October 2000)

Although this movie cost millions and millions of dollars, Steven Spielberg went for cheap ideas. Yes, this movie is just a heap of tricks and cliches that can appeal to a great bulk of the population, as it evidently did.
Sequences made of shots of guts being spilled, heads blown up intersected with sounds of war and then complete silence can be thought to be a very "artistic" and "intelligent" way to construct a movie, but in this film it certainly is not the case. The film lacks ideological background, it just plays and replays on the already used reused and recycled "horrors of war". Yes we know war is horrible, yes we know war is inhumane. What is Saving Private Ryan portraying that is new? It just plays on emotions that the public readily agrees to have, this movie hardly makes anybody think, its just restating what countless others have already said. The film is not innovative at all, it uses a formula which will guarantee positive public reaction, big bucks, an Academy Award nomination and hopefully an award, as it sadly did.
The film on its formal standpoint is just another postclassical Hollywood movie, a lot of people, big names on screen, special effects, nothing out of the ordinary. Do we see innovative or powerful use in its lighting? No. Editing? No. Camera movements? No. They do look spectacular I must agree with that, but nothing else, they have no concept to fall back on.
This is just one of the hundreds of movies that play on cliches and don't dare to go beyond, they do not dare think.