Am I nuts?

Rating: Null/10 (4 February 1999)

I'm writing here almost out of desperation. I seem to be the only one left in the world that didn't really like Saving Private Ryan. And although the other comments here were encouraging, I still feel slightly at a difference with them. Because I didn't dislike the movie because of its cinematic defects - I just disliked it because of the message it sent about war.
Now, I've been told that I'm being too hard on Spielberg. After all, Saving Private Ryan is supposedly less enthusiastic and glorifying about war than any previous movie (I would beg those of this persuasion to re-examine their opinion of Apocalypse Now). But I can't condone this trumpeting of a movie which concludes with a shot of the American flag waving in the sun as being a new representation of war.
War isn't about nobility. But Saving Private Ryan is. War is about dirt and sweat and blood and tears and futility. It's about dehumanization and loss. There are no men in war who want to reward a Mrs. Ryan with the gift of the only son she's got left. Only men who want to claim strategic posts.
Elements of these things sometimes appear in Saving Private Ryan. But they disappear again in favour of a close-up of Tom Hanks' sad-but-surviving facial expression, or an old frail man standing proud at a war grave. Any attempt at reality is then lost.
The performances are good - but everyone seems to be tripping over each other to appear the most ordinary. Although this was probably an attempt at allowing the viewer to identify the soldier with the boy-next-door, it ends up sacrificing character depth in favour of surface considerations.
All of this is not to say that Saving Private Ryan is awful, and could even be called a step in the right direction. The movie has a good premise and hits some strong notes - especially in the strange conjecture of risking the lives of five men to find one. The problem is, like all war movies to date, it tries to make sense out of what is happening to the people onscreen. Give them a goal, a purpose, and it will seem like the horror that was, was a horror that had to be.
The problem is that in doing that, Saving Private Ryan fails to say anything we haven't heard before. It's not that I don't believe good things can happen in war - it's just that I don't believe only good things can happen. And with Saving Private Ryan, cinema failed once again to take that stance.