A fine film, but just short of the best

Rating: 8/10 (17 December 2012)

I'm not quite sure how it has taken me almost 15 years to watch Saving Private Ryan. Somehow I guess I just never got round to it. Well I finally did and was left with mixed feelings.
Far more experienced movie critics and war experts than me have extolled the opening scene. So there's little more that I can add. It's power to shock and sadden surpasses almost anything I've seen before it and for that alone the film has earned its place in movie history.
Of course the downside is that if it surpassed so much before it, then it inevitably also surpassed the 100 or so minutes that followed it. I'll forgive that though. Ultimately in the story of the Normandy beach landings, the landings were the beginning and so although it's not perfect from a movie perspective, it's the only way to tell it. I did though find much of the rest of SPR remarkably standard. Yes the acting was excellent. However the characters were distinct caricatures. The bitter Jew, the loyal lieutenant, the brash New Yorker and the good guy medic. They were all finely portrayed but their characters brought nothing new to the screen. It was only Jeremy Davies' interpreter who could have come from superior war films such as Platoon or Full Metal Jacket (or even the vastly different but more cerebral The Thin Red Line, which SPR overshadowed).
My other issue is the portrayal of those damn Germans. Inglourious Bastards revels in it's over the top portrait of just about every German during WWII being Satan's sidekick. However that film has its tongue firmly in cheek. SPR does not and the German soldier who is let free by Tom Hanks' super hero captain ("he'll be picked up soon enough"), and then returns as the face of the enemy is pure Hollywood cliché.
Don't get me wrong, SPR was a fine film. The opening is shocking and the remainder is thoroughly enjoyable. The caricatures which prevented it from matching the greats also offer a large degree of comfort. They allow us to feel like we know all these characters and emphasise with them immediately, with little effort. Spielberg paints by numbers in the last battle scene though, it being all too predictable to fully believe any battle in any war ever quite happened like that. It's for this reason that in the context of the great war films (or the few I've seen to date), I'd say it falls a little short.