Great

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2013)

Steven Spielberg's 1998 war film, Saving Private Ryan, is a monumental picture. It portrays the rawest, most real-feeling, vision of war that I have ever seen. Though the grave portrayals and subject matter exclude Saving Private Ryan from being a traditionally entertaining film, it is still very engaging. It falls prey to some issues characteristic of war films and some issues characteristic of Spielberg films, but those do not take away Saving Private Ryan's claim to greatness that it rightfully deserves.
There is not an ounce of blood nor spray of bullets from beginning to end that doesn't feel real. Many highly violent films lose their impact entirely when the special effects are less than convincing and when character deaths feels too complicit to the story. Thankfully Saving Private Ryan has incredible, mainly practical, special effects, and the film is not afraid to kill even its most sympathetic characters in addition to literally boat loads of extras. The opening flashback to Omaha Beach is an incredible feat in cinema and likely the best subjective view of warfare caught on film. When the doors of the boats open and German machine guns mow down the U.S. soldiers without a moment's hesitation, it is truly shocking. For one shot the camera is in the position of a soldier near the back of a boat, his comrades in front of him. The doors open and all the soldiers in frame are ripped of their lives by an unstoppable hail of bullets. The fact that I would be dead if were there is effectively disturbing. Some other shots take place underwater. Down there the screams of the dying, pounding of artillery, and incessant chatter of machine guns are muffled. For a second I felt calm and safe, before a couple bullets penetrated the water and the soldiers beneath it, calming their struggle and causing plumes of blood to rise to the surface. The scene continues in this fashion for an extended time as it follows a group of soldiers fighting their way up the beach, eventually to victory for that specific skirmish. The Omaha Beach scene sets the mood for the rest of the film, and the final battle of the bridge matches it, providing a nice bookend for the rest of the story to play out between. Some death scenes are truly disturbing. They force you to look at your own mortality right in the face. I should mention that the direction is superb. The audience is able to achieve a new perspective on war from Spielberg's outstanding ability to link action and build a sense of omniscience coupled with harsh subjectivity. I didn't detect a false move in the entire film. While the film is a true achievement, its reliance on shock causes its impact to decrease with subsequent viewings (I've seen it thrice), but I still recognize it as a great film. One thing that detracted from Saving Private Ryan, conflicting with the realism, was its sentimentality, driven by John Williams' seemingly ubiquitous score. The sentimentality felt out of place and left a bad taste in my mouth. I could almost call the film cloying at times. Thankfully, during the parts that really matter there is no music and no forced emotion, only what happens right before your eyes which is enough to change you by itself.
War films tend to be very pure. Many times they are almost exclusively about survival, an objective, and the non-romantic relationships between the soldiers. Saving Private Ryan fits into this category. For me this excludes a certain aspect of cinema that I crave. It excludes a sense of culture, artistry, and beauty. The film is too raw for my liking. Whenever the characters come to a new town they find it in a state of wreckage. The once beautiful architecture is reduced to rubble and potential strategic positions. Of course Saving Private Ryan relies a great deal on realism and the decision to maintain its purity as a war film certainly contributes to its realism. Nevertheless my complaint stands.
For what is essentially an existential film, Saving Private Ryan manages to the fill its running time with engaging scenes, one after another. There are many incidental, almost arbitrary, occurrences. The taking of the French girl, the knocking down of a wall to reveal a platoon of enemy soldiers. The list goes on. Yes these scenes are sufficiently engaging even if each one does not contribute to a central story thrust. More than that they add to the sense of mayhem and disarray that surely accompanies soldiers embroiled in such a conflict. Whereas I might be tempted to label this style as fluff or meaningless in other films, the existential mode fits Saving Private Ryan very well.
Saving Private Ryan is a great film. It is an achievement in cinema and also fascinating to watch. While a few issues prevent me from calling it a masterpiece I can confidently say that I will watch it again someday.
33/40