It's not history, although ambitious

Rating: 1/10 (9 March 2004)

Spielberg set out to make a realistic depiction of the Omaha Beach landings to kick off his film, which is about a fictional mission of a squad to rescue one Pvt Ryan, of the airborne, dropped inland behind the beaches. One glaring idiocy of the film is why they would dispatch soldiers from the Omaha sector to rescue someone dropped
behind the Utah sector, especially when 4th Infantry Div soldiers are
already in contact with a large portion of the airborne troops. The answer is, of course, because that gives Spielberg his opportunity to display the Omaha landings rather than the Utah beach landings next door, which were too easy and lacked any bloody combat. If the only thing anyone knows about the V Corps landings at Omaha came from this film, then they would have been better off skipping the film, or at least the opening scenes of battle. Read a book and learn what happened at Omaha. You'll find that it wasn't anywhere near as bloody as Spielberg's film leads one to believe. Omaha Beach was considered bloody only because of comparison with landings at the other 4 beaches, which were virtually walkovers. The rest of the movie is not much to see, with many errors in the combat sequences, especially with respect to tactics that would have been used. Spielberg's film is badly flawed as history, and the story is downright unbelievable - why not radio the 101st and order Ryan off the line? Why send a few guys to walk thru the entire German 7th Army and search in a 400 square mile area for some guy named Ryan? The US Army wasn't always the most efficient, but they would never have sent off a squad on such a cockamamie mision.