Saddening, difficult to watch, but an excellent tale of war

Rating: 10/10 (24 July 2000)

"Saving Private Ryan" starts out with a very graphic, difficult, and fascinating scene of American soldiers storming the beaches on D-Day. The scene is tragic and merciless, but probably almost exactly what is was like for the real soldiers in WWII. Tom Hanks plays a Captain John H. Miller, one of the first soldiers on the beach, and a leader of the attack on the Germans at the fortified beach-heads. Three days after that first landing on the beaches of Normandy, Capt. Miller is given a new assignment: He is to take a special task force of eight men through occupied, war-torn northern France to try and find one wayward paratrooper named James Francis Ryan. The reason for this seemingly absurd mission to find one man, a simple Private, is because his mother back in Iowa has already lost three sons, and the army wants to do the decent thing and let the last Ryan brother, James, have a free ticket home to be with his mother. The movie is long, graphic, and painful to watch at times, but it has absolutely excellent acting, writing, camerawork, directing, and cinematography. This is definitely one of the greatest war films I've ever seen.