Frank Capra updated

Rating: 8/10 (24 August 1999)

Tom Hanks is excellent and his character is wonderfully developed, while the action sequences are second to none. But ultimately "Saving Private Ryan" is like so many war movies I saw as a kid, regardless of how well rendered. The opening scene (after the shlocky frame) as they storm the beach at Normandy is pretty awful. You get the sense that a nation shows its resolve by how many of its young men it is willing to sacrifice. Just throw the bodies out there. In Kosovo we held that number to zero. Such a lovely way to fight a war. In WW II the number was, however many it took. Says something. Spielberg makes this point with the wide-angled shot of the channel filled with Allied landing craft and support vessels for as far as the eye can see-a scene incidentally right out of Frank Capra's seminal series "Why We Fight" to which this film is indebted whether Spielberg knows it or not.
World War II was a war so horrible and so all encompassing that to this day we really don't understand it or comprehend it. Spielberg thought he was being "objective" in showing war "as it really was," with Americans murdering prisoners and vomiting from fear and dying like cattle without a chance (something Capra of course was not able to do). Yes, but to show the "saving grace" of individual valor is to perpetuate the war system, because that valor is a fraud. It was not the bravery of our soldiers that won the war. Just as it didn't matter how brave or how cowardly the soldiers were in the landing craft, it was the sheer volume of them that prevailed.
I think as long as one believes that individual heroics amount to something we will have war. Spielberg no doubt thinks he has shown us the horror and waste of war, but while plying the trade he knows so well (seducing the audience) he has trumpeted the glory of war, that old fraud, and so he is just like the rest of the proselytizers, only more skillful.
Still it is impossible to say what is right. If we had not won WW II the world today would be vastly different. Totalitarian, imperial, repressive, racist regimes in which the state tortures and enslaves the people would have prevailed. They may have nuked one another by now and we could be living in the rubble of a bestial existence. Who knows? Thank God for the United States and its incredible industrial capacity, because that is what won the war, not individual heroics, much as our tribal minds, along with Spielberg's, would like to believe such fairy tales.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)