Well-executed movie but the point is unclear

Rating: 7/10 (14 May 2005)

Saving Private Ryan is well-filmed and well-acted. But it is thematically a mess, and on that count is wildly overrated.
The complaints about this movie on these IMDb comments are two: one that it is properly speaking an anti-war film, and the other that it indulges in crude nationalism. Both complaints are on the mark, but it should be noticed that they are not quite consistent with one another. Saving Private Ryan, in the tradition of Vietnam movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, focuses on the human cost of war. But its moral, that we must earn the sacrifice those bold men made for us so long ago, sits rather uncomfortably with the focus on the cost. After all, how could we earn the loss of these men and the grief of their mothers? By living well? By being good people? It doesn't make sense. How could you make your life worth the sacrifice of so many others?
Perhaps the point is that we ought to be grateful to the men who fought and died for saving our lives. But this doesn't make sense either. The war in Europe did not properly speaking save our lives. Wars are rarely if ever fought to save lives. They are fought to conquer and to defend against being conquered. But being conquered does not amount to being killed, and it might well save lives to surrender. Spielberg does obliquely refer to the Holocaust in the film. But he must know as everyone does that the war was not fought to end the Holocaust.
Perhaps Spielberg is tacitly assuming some flag-waving boilerplate about how they fought 'for freedom', and we ought to be grateful for that. I don't deny that 'saving Europe for liberal democracy'however we understand that--was a noble cause. But it would be impossible to tell from this movie that this was the point of the war, and it might well be impossible to believe that such a cause was worth dying for once you had properly taken in its message: that war is the senseless destruction of mothers' sons.
War movies traditionally fall into two types. One type focuses on the heroic cause the soldiers fought for, in which case you will want to glorify war. You will want to make your soldiers look strong, noble, and make our hearts melt with admiration for them. Otherwise how can we encourage others to fight for such (often abstract) causes? Most classic WWII movies fit this mold. And given that most of us think WWII was fought for a good cause, this makes sense. The other alternative is to focus on the human cost of war, as Vietnam movies and WWI movies typically do. But it isn't a coincidence that Vietnam and WWI are thought to be pointless wars. The idea of such movies is that nationalism and social habits can lead us to sacrifice our children for nothing. By shocking us with the horror of war, we are encouraged to mistrust martial impulses.
Saving Private Ryan tries to take from both traditions, and ends up with a garbled mess. WWII was a noble cause that could not have been worth the sacrifice.
It might be argued that each type of movie neglects some important truth that the other type captures. Perhaps some great filmmaker will successfully ennoble the causes of war and at the same time capture its horror. Perhaps someone already has. All I know is that Spielberg has not.