Great Special Effects! Bad Acting. Scenes of Exaggerated Carnage.

Rating: 1/10 (23 January 2013)

Saving Private Ryan is awash with wildly exaggerated scenes of carnage. Seems like every member of the GRRREATEST Generation wants to be remembered for the kind of over-the-top violence that has graced Vietnam War films. "Oh yeah, that's just how it was!" Right. Looks like Omaha Beach lost every other guy. Nope. One in ten.
We have pictures of the Normandy Landing. Look at them. Does the beach look anything like Spielberg's beach? Spielberg's beach looks like a video game. Bullets streaking through the water and killing the soldiers as they swim up from the bottom of sea. This is how history gets rewritten.
Suppose there was one landing boat that landed right in front of a pill box (good thinking) and got hell shot out of it. Why is Spielberg showing that one unfortunate boat? Feel manipulated? Get used to it. This whole soap opera is chock full of Bridges-of-Madison-County drawn- out boring melodramatic scenes designed to pluck at your heart strings.
Oliver Stone complains that Spielberg is playing into the "Good War" mantra that is currently being used to finance the War on Terror. I saw no signs of that. I saw US soldiers shooting down unarmed POWs and beating prisoners. A touch of Vietnam to thrill our taste for revenge? Or is it just part of the arms race between chicken-hawk war directors trying to stimulate our jaded tastes?
The acting is atrocious. It's hard to blame the actors, really, since we don't get to know them at all. They are simply red-shirts waiting their turn to get shot down or get into hissy fits. Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks (as always). There's no tension. We know what's going to happen, we're just waiting for it. And it all unfolds so slowly. It's boring. The scenes that could contain some excitement are spent in a quick and confused blur. It's a mess. There's no more artistry in this movie than is contained in your typical music video. Halftracks and Rangers pop up out of nowhere as our heroes cross an open field. Endless streams of machine gun fire pour out from nowhere in particular. It's just ludicrous.
There are few scenes in Saving Private Ryan that aren't replete with unnaturally sentimental dialog, unrealistic dissension in the ranks, haunted stares, tears, and Hollywood's rendition of jaunty, chummy talk. They might as well have been a bunch of teenage girls. One Star, for the CGI.