overrated

Rating: Null/10 (25 March 1999)

OK, so I was obviously not part of WWII, or ANY war for that matter. Even so, I have seen some GREAT war movies in my time that made me feel like I was actually there and going through the emotions and struggles that all soldiers experience in battle.
So why am I calling Saving Private Ryan overrated when it's been touted as the most realistic war movie ever made? It just didn't have the emotion. Sure, it looked grisly on the screen, especially the first 15 minutes. But I never got a sense that I was there...that I was feeling what Tom Hanks was feeling. In fact, I felt as if I were sitting in a movie theater watching a movie. The special effects in the first 15 minutes were also very bad. I cringed at the corniness whenever they had a scene with a downed soldier playing with his innards. It looked more like spaghetti than intestines and was an obvious device for shock value (which did not work one single bit).
The story itself was interesting enough. However, it was very limited, if you think about it. The movie transformed itself from a dramatic war movie to a simple action flick about searching for an ordinary soldier and then taking on an entire German unit with 6 or 7 soldiers. It reminded me more of Rambo than an Oscar-nominated movie.
The two best war movies I have ever seen both came out in the same year. Platoon and Full Metal Jacket were REAL war movies. I absolutely fell in love with Platoon when I watched it. I actually felt like I was there in the jungle with Charlie company and I knew all the soldiers in my troop. It was an experience. Saving Private Ryan never really puts you there. Instead, it drags you along and makes you follow a bunch of guys walking around the whole movie looking for this private Ryan guy.
The movie was "important" because it was about WWII and because Steven Spielberg was involved. Spielberg has reached the status where he can do no wrong and everything he comes out with is considered a masterpiece. If he were to make a film about origami, everyone would suddenly embrace origami as the greatest lost art of our time and there would be conventions and books and tributes about how great origami is.
Saving Private Ryan is a product of a well-respected director and actor making the best out of their reputations. As a film, it is certainly not the best movie I've seen, and even not the best I've seen last year (Life is Beautiful and Dark City takes the cake on that). It is more of an action flick than a human drama and mroe about making money than it is about war.
While I still enjoyed the movie, I enjoyed it on the same plane as a regular action flick. If put next to a film like Life is Beautiful or Platoon, it certainly takes a back seat.