One Of The Cinematic Experiences Of My Life

Rating: 10/10 (8 September 2003)

Watching "Saving Private Ryan" was one of my greatest cinematic experiences.
The first twenty minutes of the film is truly astonishing. It's as if I was actually running up the beach, with bullets going all around me, slicing people to bits and bombs blowing off everywhere, tearing everyone to shreds. There was a feeling of total hopelessness of the existing and forthcoming carnage around me.
I remember when I first saw the film, there was somebody left of me who was so traumatized by the Omaha invasion sequence, she covered her eyes and went out of the theater. There was a seemingly hardened old man right of me who said he has never have seen such horrifying experience in his life.
Yes, this film has many flaws. I found the script to be very conventional and there were many corny cliches. The characters are not very well developed. Even the tank battle at the end, an amazing scene than matched the Omaha scene in tension, is pretty much Hollywoodized; it showed many military inaccuracies. I had participated in message boards that many military analysts rightfully criticized the ending as being very unrealistic.
However, it's still hard to not say this is a groundbreaking powerhouse of a war film that will (and had probably already) changed Hollywood war cinema forever. The intense violence of this film will teach generations of people that war is not fun and games. War really sucks.