What's it worth?

Rating: Null/10 (2 November 1998)

Being an amateur historian, SPR confirmed a lesson I had already learned: next time the USA gets into a war -- WIN IT! And don't let up or pull punches until the enemy is beaten and *knows* he's beaten. FDR was the last US president who could make up his mind to win a war. Truman split the difference in Korea -- granted, a good move in an uncertain world. LBJ sent millions into a war he had absolutely no intention of winning or even settling for a Korea-style armistice. Bush, with his hazy, myopic talk about some "New World Order" and "the vision thing", is now unemployed while Saddam Hussein still butchers Iraqi civilians and blames the UN (read: US) for it. And Clinton -- great at negotiating a peace, for those who want peace. But for those who don't...?
I refer, of course, to the scene dripping with face-to-face hate where the German SS trooper (betcha didn't notice he was) whom they let go on a promise to turn himself in ("be-e-e-e good!") shoots and knifes some of them while the last one sits in a soiled diaper of his own fear and self-pity. Minerva was the Greco-Roman Goddess of Wisdom; she was also the Gs. of Just Wars. But this was the image of Mars: the God of Combat in War. Even von Clausewitz refers to the Hate in combat.
(Pause. Deep breath.)
That much said, I have to agree with just about every comment on SPR. The story is weak. The bits with the flags and the strings are maudlin, to say the least. And all the other stuff about plot development/character development. Yes, Spielberg himself admitted it took the disillusionment of the Vietnam War to make this movie, yet he still blatantly tugs at your heartstrings -- he's been doing that since ET; I've long since learned to ignore his saccharine ploys. And yes, this is one of the best movies ever made, even if there were better war or antiwar pics made. Only the battle scenes really make this movie -- it should get the Oscar for Cinematography.
But the thing I got from SPR throughout was from the characters griping about why they should risk their necks for one man. The general theme of the movie appears, to me at any rate, to be "this $%^& better be worth it!" -- the universal gripe from the universal soldier. Now, you tell me, is any of this $%^& worth your neck or mine if your side has absolutely no intent of winning or even getting something out of all this? The US military morale went down the toilet after 1968 and spent the '70s in a drug-induced haze. It took Reagan's 1980s build-up to rebuild morale; without it the Gulf War would never have been so one-sided.
No, I'm no soldier, nor some fascist war-freak in a rathole filled with white-trash-militia collectables. I've watched the horrors of war comfortably on my TV or my PC, just like many of us surfing this site. I'm as revulsed as anyone else at the pictures and the news-stories. I get an impotent rage demanding "do something, Powers-That-Be!", knowing full well they have no idea what to do, given the limits they set on themselves. I'm as pro-peace as they come. But I'm also pro-good-sense -- not just "common-sense." There was a difference between Chamberlain and Churchill. One saw hell coming and tried to buy it off; the other saw it coming and said, "get ready!" And this, certainly, was a disciple of Minerva.
(Pause again. Another deep breath.)
I'd say more but the guys with the butterfly nets have traced me. Just let me sign off by saying that if we want a world at peace then we best make our minds up to make that peace and *enforce* it! Nobody did in the 1930s; that's why there was a *Second* World War.
One other thing -- I wonder how will SPR play on home-video? Will it be as horrifying?