Fantasy reigns supreme

Rating: 2/10 (12 August 1998)

Spielberg just about had it here, at least for the first half hour or so. He looked at the bone-crunching, grisly history of D-day and had the movie to put it on the screen with some respect for honest reality. Then, with his Hollywood sellout lack of vision, Spielberg decided to throw it all away on patriotic fantasy. The 'true' story the film may be based on has some chaplain in France discovering Ryan after word was passed along that his brothers had all been lost and the lad should be shipped back to America so his mother still has one child to work the farm. Or, the story could be straight out of the writer's head but it hardly matters. The premise itself strikes the viewer as utterly ludicrous after a half-hour of complete slaughter, the seas red with human blood and gore. We are expected to believe that an army chief is sitting in his office and worrying over Private Ryan and his family while the assault on Normandy is costing thousands upon thousands of lives, while the allied bombers are missing their mark up and down the coast and Hitler's machine guns are just mowing down allies like grass. What romantic rubbish and so typical of Hollywood. And the portrayal of the German prisoner is morally offensive. The German people have never been less human than Americans, even when they were lead by an evil leader into a war. To portray them as Spielberg does the prisoner, a bumbling idiot who later becomes a murdering snake, hissing shhh as he slowly sinks a huge knife into an American chest, is low-brow, hateful stuff. But nobody is going to notice. Believe me. In fact, we love to see the world in black and white, simplistic terms. Here come the Oscars for Spielberg. Americans (and my own Canadians too) are generally not prepared to see the truth about themselves. Capital 'D' Denial reigns supreme, especially at the box-office. Spielberg's big budget is spent to further anesthetize us while claiming to be trying to do justice to the truth. If he'd stayed on the beach at Omaha, he'd have a nine out of ten. Instead, he rates several points less for this updated version of that old T.V. series called Combat. Please see Amy Taubin's review at the following URL. It's much more articulate and generous than mine.
http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/30taubin.shtml