A Brave look at WWII?

Rating: 9/10 (16 April 1999)

The effect this movie has on you is devastating. The combat scenes in the movie are where you can find Speilberg exploring territory that no other director has before in war movies. Spielberg comes as close to capturing the madness of war by showing us the horror in an unrelenting fashion. Deaths alternate between quick and horrifying and slow and agonizing. It's unfortunate that such a pedestrian script was used to connect the awesome combat scenes. But the frustratingly simplistic plotline serves as a way for the characters to question war in a way a post-Vietnam American would, without making such questioning seem historically preposterous (as it did in "The Thin Red Line," whose "hero" has gone AWOL just months following Pearl Harbor). The movie would have been a 10 if not for the bookends (Private Ryan visiting Normandy as an old man) that were taken from "Titanic."