Good as a drinking game

Rating: 5/10 (26 December 2004)

I could have made a lot of money from this movie. While watching it with a friend I kept saying "he is going to die now" and guess what...he did. Now if only I had made a bet of $10 each time that happened I would have had made enough to cover my movie ticket, the price of the popcorn and drink, plus I would have been able go out to a café afterwards.
The plot is interesting. A group of American soilders must cross the scattered D-day lines to find a soldier whose brothers have all been killed so he can be sent home because the President of the US of A promised that he could.
The them of this movie is obvious. People made sacrifices to keep the world safe during world war II. Do we as a generation live up to those sacrifices. My view is, nope, you bastards took Vietnam away from a pro-American Ho Chi Min and gave it to the French (then Ho Chi Min got angry and kicked your American butts as you deserve). You rounded up the communists in Greece at the end of WWII and had them shot (so of course they had a communist uprising later).
This is a sad pathetic and obvious movie that tries to justify America to Americans.
The only thing that makes up for that is the honesty of the war scenes and truth in the characters (other than Private Ryan who turns out to by some sort of Uber American symbol so we can feel good about him being saved).
Watch it with friends so you can play the Saving Private Ryan drinking game. It works like this, people call out the names of characters they think are going to die. If they do die within 5 minutes everyone drinks, if they don't the person who called out drinks.