The film should have stayed on the beach

Rating: 5/10 (27 December 2019)

Sometimes, more than a decade later, you revisit a film and it impacts you differently than the first time you saw it.
Dunkirk gets a lot right where this movie went wrong. They tried to make it about too much.
Movies only have about 2 hours of running time to tell the story. The beginning is crucial, because you're bringing the audience into that world, and it has to be easily understood, because most of us hate exposition, voice over narration, title crawls helpfully explaining things.
The first 20 minutes of this movie are about as virtuoso as you can get. A lot of film making techniques had to be used, and in one case invented, to create that sequence. It's effective. It's terrifying. It's exactly how a D Day invasion movie should be. They get it 100% right.
The rest of the movie is typical Spielberg aiming for his 8 year old target audience, with cloying sentimentality.
The bookends that surround the movie also cheat. In the beginning, as we zoom into the eyes of the old man, it's established this is Hanks - same eye color. At the end, we zoom out of Damons eye and back into the old mans eyes - different eye color. The movie violates its own internal logic. I had a huge argument with my stepfather, an Air Force veteran, about it. He suggested they were going for the "it's Everyman" idea. I suggested that the director just wanted to have it his own way.
The most ridiculous part of the movie is when they tell Upham not to salute the Captain out in the field (because of snipers) yet the Captain has shiny Captain bars on his helmet for the whole word to see. Because we're so stupid we can't possibly see that Tom Hanks is not in command without his shiny Captain bars.