7 and 1/2 stars for successfully depicting the war experience

Rating: Null/10 (13 June 1999)

Coming out of Saving Private Ryan, one detail was surprisingly clear. This is not as gruesome or violent a movie as most make it out to be. The violence occuring onscreen is realistic, but never is it gut-wrenchingly unbearable. For example, many images of soldiers being shot in the middle of their forehead look completely convincing, but at the same time are not disturbing. I suspect this is due to the fact that the violence itself is not gratuitous or dwelled upon for long periods of time. In Schindler's List, there is a scene were an old man is taken out of a line and has a gun pointed to his head by a German soldier, while the viewer gets a closeup of this cruelty. A couple of seconds pass where we just await the man to be shot dead. And it is in these few, passive seconds where the viewer is viscerally shaken because he or she has the preoccuring knowledge that the man is about to be killed. Whereas in Saving Private Ryan, every soldier is either shot down quickly, or the act of violence is not as closeup in the viewer's objectivity. The violence is not there to be just flat-out disgusting but to reflect upon its effect on the characters and the film's ideals. Although is this the film's virtue or disadvantage? Anyway the hype is undeserved. Never do you see a soldier's head blown away from his torso or the like. If you can handle award-winning pyrotechnics, then you can sit through this film. With that being said, perhaps something more important should. Saving Private Ryan just is not the best war film ever made, or even Steven Spielberg's best directing effort. It is bogged down by a number of cliches (it begins to rain right when our protagonists approach danger, one soldier accidentely reveals the enemy simply by sitting down, the band of soldiers is comprised of the usual wide-range of character types, etc). It lacks the thorough plot and execution of theme that Spielberg accomplished so easily and satisfactorily in his own Schindler's List. The tears and awe of the experience people had when they left the theater after that film was not there so much this time. Maybe that's the exact point the film is trying to get across, though. Perhaps its purpose (and only idea achieved) is to simply show that war is hell and what it is really like--to settle the look of the war film once and for all. If this was the movie's objective, then it does so in flying colors. But that's about all. The spiritual aspect is missing, and this is why the film could have been better. Schindler's List told the horrors of the Holocaust, but left the viewer with lasting images and lessons on basic humankind--the kind of secondary impression Saving Private Ryan lacks.