Pretty bad history

Rating: 1/10 (1 September 2003)

I was hoping for an accurate war film for a change (take a look at the Battle of the Bulge for a really bad example). What Spielberg shows us in his Omaha Beach scenes makes me wonder
which Omaha Beach assault he is trying to portray. Those who know little about the battle (that's almost everyone who's in the theater) probably now have the idea that every other soldier who landed on the beach before noon was either blown to smithereens or badly wounded.
Believe me, the 1st and 29th Divisions would have been annihilated if it
were as bad as it's portrayed and would never have been able to scale the cliffs and rout the enemy by early afternoon, which they did. I wonder, for example, how wide most viewers think Omaha beach actually was. In the film it looks about a couple hundred yards. It was, in actuality, almost ten miles wide. The timing was also inaccurate - Hanks goes up the cliffs at what appears to be 8AM. Nobody made it before 11AM. Another historical error is the implication that the events at Omaha were similar to those on the other four assualt beaches (Juno, Sword, Gold and Utah). That's totally incorrect. Utah Beach, for example, the other US assault beach, took about a dozen casualties - many of those due to accidents during the landing rather than from enemy action. But the worst part of the movie was the completely idiotic script. Here we have the US Army sending a squad(a squad!!!) to march straight thru the entire German 7th Army (something two Divisions, with total air superiority couldn't do for weeks), waltz around an area of 300 square miles, and expect to find a guy named Ryan. If they wanted to do any of this nonsense, the Army would have sent them in on the gliders that flew into the area the very next morning. "Gliders, what gliders"? said Spielberg. That's what happens when you have a scriptwriter who doesn't know very much about his subject. A stupid, stupid film. What a waste of $100M or so.