Desperately violent and grossly overrated

Rating: 3/10 (13 March 1999)

Remember the heart-rending scene in "Titanic" where the mother is telling a story to her two doomed children in bed as the ship is going down? If Spielberg had made "Titanic", we would have been treated to the sight of the mother and children sucking in salt water and slowly drowning. And movie-goers would be saying, "Well, that's the way it really was! Why pull punches?" So in "Saving Private Ryan", we're subjected to people exploding and being decapitated as a substitute for real drama.
Spielberg personifies the philosophy, "If you CAN show it, you MUST show it". Show it he does - the violence, that is. But if you really want to get an idea of why these men were able to rise to heroic levels, or if you want to return to that time in our nation's history and meet those people, get to know and understand those people, this just ain't the movie.
But if you want an incredible amount of action (did any one soldier ever see so much action?) then this is the movie for you. Great special effects, almost all of which were put to use showing how bullets penetrate bodies and rip limbs off.
Recommendation: Go rent "The Big Red One", made in 1980. It communicates the horror of war by humanizing the participants. The closing scene showing the soldiers clearing out the remnants of a concentration camp is a miniature masterpiece. And not one person's head has to explode to get us to understand the violence perpetrated by men against men.