A brilliant war film - the best ever!

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2007)

Bullets slash through the air. Everything explodes around you. Your men are getting shelled to death everywhere you look. Blood goes in your face. You lose your sanity in war. You don't know what to do, or where to go. This is SPR's depiction of Omaha Beach on D-Day 1944, and an absolutely brilliant one at that. Not since SPR has any filmmaker with any budget churned out an action scene as horrifyingly real as this film's brutal depiction of the Normandy landings. Even if for nothing else other than the first half-hour, you should still watch this film. From the moment you see nervous recruits chuck up inside the Higgins boats, you can tell you are in for a stunning action scene. Though after that the film won't ever be as intense or shocking in its action, it is still something truly special. The desaturated colours, abundance of shouting, swearing and explosions tell you one thing - this is war. Though Black Hawk Down is easily as intense as this, it just doesn't have the gritty feel of SPR and you can't exactly care about the characters. But on this, you can - they're all real people leading real lives back home - no horrible sacrifices or acts of heroism - just ordinary guys like us, thrust into a world that they didn't like and in which they knew death awaited them at any corner. I doubt anybody will ever make a war movie that will recapture SPR's dizzy heights. Flags of our Fathers didn't do the job and Letters From Iwo Jima, though it is looking promising, just isn't intended to be a box-office smash. Though SPR is full of war-movie clichés, it is far better than most movies and besides, it is hard to like a movie without an emotional or sentimental side - every film needs a heart. And the war memorial scenes at the beginning and end of the film show us what SPR wanted to be all along - a respectful homage to the soldiers of WWII. To be honest, with all the intense and bloody action scenes in this film putting us in the thick of battle, it is good to have a bit of emotional contemplation once in a while. War is brutal and unforgiving, but war is also saddening and tear-jerking - Saving Private Ryan uses both those sides to its advantage. Forget major plot twists or superbly intelligent and brilliant scripts, clever plots that lose you and amazing hero characters - realism is the place to be in war cinema. That may explain why Saving Private Ryan did so well for itself. 10/10