Sentimental

Rating: 1/10 (4 December 1999)

Overrated and Sentimental. Doesn't have anything new to add to the genre. Re-treads the WWII films of the 1950s and early 1960s. Films like TO HELL AND BACK, PATHS OF GLORY, SANDS OF IWO JIMA, PORKCHOP HILL, THE LONGEST DAY, THE VICTORS, etc. Those films, in my opinion, were fine but I wouldn't want to watch them all over again. That's how I felt sitting in the theater on opening day. Like I was sitting through each and every one of those films. In the overwrought, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Spielberg supplies his patented boyish sense of wonder; something, I believe, is out of place in a genre that is often appropriately somber. What I'm saying is, I just want to see a war drama that appeals to the mind rather than the emotions. A film like the brilliant, introspective, THE THIN RED LINE.