a postmodern antiwar film, self-conscious, deeply flawed

Rating: 6/10 (30 September 2002)

The subversive postmodernism couldn't be more obvious, no almost no one notices, so corrupted are we by the malaise of pacificist impotence. The whole concept of basing a film against the very flow of D-Day--the "heroes" are not there to win anything, they're there only to drag someone out. While thousands of Americans, Brits, Aussies, Canadians, Free French and others are dying fighting Hitler's army and Luftwaffe, Spielberg is leading a campaign of mighty forces to pull a lone American out of the combat zone no matter what the cost. To use the world's greatest invasion from the sea as the mere backdrop to a story is, to me, perverse, and trivializes the extraordinary efforts both of the men who fought during the Normandy invasions and the earlier generation of filmmakers who sought to portray that effort on a grand, much nobler canvas.