A movie that will make you fully realize the horrors of war

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 1998)

As a 17-year-old, I find the thought of war particularly harrowing, since I and my peers would be eligible for the draft if war were to break out. If it did, I honestly don't know what I'd do; but the action of going into the middle of the battlefield surrounded by bullets and men with blood streaming out of their bodies seems too terrible to contemplate. And it's all too easy to intellectualize war, particularly for those who are well beyond draftable age, saying, "Yeah, it would be terrible, but it's your duty as a citizen." That's not considering the complete picture; people who have such a simple answer can't possibly understand what being in a war would be like . "Saving Private Ryan," in all its brutal realism, should make people think twice before saying something like that so nonchalantly. Because the fact is, people go into battles and get their limbs blown off, get shot five times in the chest, or, worst of all, get hit where they don't die immediately and then just have to lie there, whimpering that they're going to die. People who haven't been in war can say it's terrible but if you're called, it's your duty; but I imagine that most people who have experienced war will only tell you that it's terrible. Many things have already been said about this movie that I needn't repeat. It definitely was an outstanding motion picture.
But there is one thing I want to say about those who are so intent on complaining about the bookend scenes being too sentimental, and that's this : the sentimentality wasn't the point. At least not in my mind. At the end , when the old man is looking at the grave of one of his comrades, his wife walks up to him. She looks at the grave too, but her expression is blank, and her gaze quickly away from the grave to the old man's face, a face that has written on it the knowledge of what the man whose name is on the cross did for him. When I saw those two people, I gasped, because I realized that the two of them were on opposite sides of the spectrum of experience and were therefore seeing completely different things embodied by the cross- to the woman, the cross was simply the life of her husband; he was what mattered to her. But to the man, the cross was everything the war had been- the terrible fighting, the killing, the sacrifice that the man in the ground beneath him had given for him. That was what I got out of the "bookend" scenes, and I found that moment to be one of the most poignant moments of the entire movie.
"Schindler's List" transcended the form of cinema; it didn't even feel like a movie, or a documentary, for that matter, it was so well-done. "Saving Private Ryan" still struck me as a movie (save the first scene, which really puts you there), but it was, nevertheless, one of the most powerful movies I've ever seen.