New Heights Achieved

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 1998)

Saving Private Ryan is a terrific cinematic achievement. It's a great combat film, very violent and often relentless, with battle scenes that lift the genre to new heights. Saving Private Ryan is a classic shoot 'em up film, or should that be shoot 'em off film, one that will always be compared favourably, at least in terms of the fight scenes, to other modern American battle movies like Platoon, Apocalypse Now or The Deer Hunter.
A squad of American infantrymen lead by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks), having somehow survived the carnage of the D day landing on Omaha Beach in Northern France, are given the task of finding Private Ryan (Matt Damon) who's three brothers have all been killed in action in other battles. The Army have decided to try to evacuate the last remaining brother.
The squad have reservations about this mission, feeling that risking eight of them just for one private is a bit rich, but off they go searching for this lost paratrooper behind enemy lines in a very hot war. These men are battle hardened except for their translator Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) who has yet to fire a gun in anger. Along the way two are killed, raising the stakes considerably. Private Ryan, when and if they find him, had better be worth it.
Saving Private Ryan is striking on a number of fronts. Overwhelming realism is forced on the audience in all of the battle scenes beginning with a whole landing craft full of soldiers slaughtered in seconds by machine gun bullets when the door of the craft drops, even before they hit the beach. And that's only the beginning. Throughout the film a hand held camera jerks and ducks with the soldiers as they try to just survive. Limbs and intestines are lost and maimed. The horror and bedlam of war has never been portrayed as graphically.
Lots of new cinematic ground is broken. For a start the slaughter by Americans of prisoners of war in the heat of battle becomes justifiable, or at least understandable in this film. I can't remember American soldiers murdering unarmed assailants on film before, not like they do in Saving Private Ryan. I can see now that the viciousness of the situation, the deaths of comrades, makes a mockery of The Geneva Convention when the bullets are flying on a battle field. These things aren't right of course, but they are understandable.
As such it's salient that this was a Second World War battle movie. It's hard to imagine this sort of film being made about American soldiers in Vietnam or Iraq for example. It's still arguable that the yanks were fighting a relatively just war in Europe in response to the invasion of the rest of Europe by Hitler's army but it would be difficult for such claims to be made of many of the U.S.A.'s more recent invasions.
Steven Speilberg, the director of Saving Private Ryan, is steeped in the traditions of Hollywood and wasn't slow to use the conventions of the old propaganda post war films. The multi-ethnic mix has been resurrected amongst the squad. The wise cracking Brooklynite (Edward Burns), the Jewish American (Adam Goldberg) the solid middle American Sergeant (Tom Sizemore) and the sharp shooting, (and unfortunately bible quoting) Southern boy (Barry Pepper) are hauled out yet again.
Often war films are coming of age movies but Jeremy Davies as the aesthete translator is the only character in Saving Private Ryan who develops and grows, the rest are already established as warriors. Tom Hanks plays the Captain very effectively indeed, with a great deal of restraint, and I would imagine that he will be nominated for yet another Academy Award.
The American Flag is unfurled and waved with more than a little enthusiasm in Saving Private Ryan, which is a tad trying for some non Americans, but again this seems irrelevant because Saving Private Ryan is essentially a battle movie, and an exciting one. But of course, the only traitorous individual in sight is a German.
Perhaps it's a mistake to expect too much subtlety from Speilberg anyway. Steven Speilberg strengths lie with the visual. He's uncomfortable with character development, conversation and the variance of personalities. Schindler's List, another of his films and the one most likely to be compared with Saving Private Ryan, was devastating for its audience, but that was because of the slaughter, the heartlessness, of the huge massacre that was the holocaust. It was painted with a broad brush on an immense canvas.
The same can be said of Saving Private Ryan. We care for the way that some of the characters die but there are just too many of them. This is Spielberg's triumph in Saving Private Ryan and also its weakness. If Spielberg had been able to make us care very much about whether Private Ryan was saved of not, then Saving Private Ryan would have been even more magnificent!