To the everlasting glory of the iiiiinfantry...

Rating: 1/10 (19 January 2001)

I can't be the only person who thinks this is Starship Troopers with the Evil Nazi Scourge standing in for the Bugs.
For one, the combat scenes are no more war-is-hell realistic and bloody than Starship Troopers. It's nice to see protagonists who aren't superhuman, but this is only a (moderately) original take for big budget blockbusters, it's hardly ground breaking cinema.
Just as in Starship Troopers, the characters barely qualify as one dimensional, and I can't be the only one who found them so irritatingly stereotypical that SPR almost qualifies as a parody.
A particular point of interest is that Mr Spielberg's Evil Nazi Scourge are portrayed only slightly more sympathetically than the Bugs in Starship Troopers. If you get your knowledge of history from Hollywood (which a lot of people do), then you'd be forgiven for thinking that every single German was a soulless Nazi who deserved to die, and that WWII was just USA vs Japan and Germany. I do have a fair amount of sympathy for Spielberg's stance, but it's interesting to compare his sweeping generalisations with 1930's Nazi anti-Jewish, anti-Romany propaganda. It's sad but not really surprising that Spielberg's audience accepts his skewed message just as unquestioningly as the German moviegoers did in the 1930's.
The idea for SPR is actually sound, but the implementation is just so overdone that I really can't bring myself to care about any of it, other than to feel contempt for the brutal liberties it takes with history. If I'm going to watch good-vs-bad fantasy, I'd prefer to stick with Starship Troopers which at least doesn't try to pass itself off as something significant and profound.