significant flaws abound, but has merit

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 1999)

After making such inexcusable trash as The Lost World, Spielberg just can't be taken seriously (neither can Tom Hanks, after Forrest Gump), no matter how hard he tries. And in his most recent attempt at redemption, he doesn't succeed in the slightest: He simply cannot refrain from being the typical Spielberg with his heavy-handed, lofty and ultimately sappy direction. The problem here is not the film per-se, it's the fact that he tries to pass it to us as Reality :the supreme truth about WWII. In fact, not only there are many visible historical and strategic inaccuracies, but most importantly, the human interaction is injected with familiar Spilbergian fakeness I coudn't help noticing. The dialogue, aside from a couple of obligatory f-words and a few explicit sexual references, feels at least fifty years old, when the Hollywood Character Actors went about delivering grand, all-important speeches, and witty , crowdpleasing lines. Sorry, Steven, but if you wanted to "keep it real", you should've cut down on melodramatics or better yet, hired a different screenwriter. The soldiers suffer from a lack of character development, and remain nothing but polished stereotypes, their emotional responses not always justified. If all the obvious false-note subplots that make this a Spielberg vehicle would be removed (Hanks' trembling hand, the German prisoner's hysterical clowning, one of the privates' "symbolic" confrontation with the enemy as a Jew, and so on), SPR's level of realism would have been consistent enough to allow for it's now-classic status. The main reasons to view this film, of course, are the two Battle Scenes, enveloping the story, (much like in the Wild Bunch). Only here, instead of using Peckinpah's now-cliched slow motion violence, the scenes are shot in real-time, or even speeded up slightly to an amazing effect. John Williams, thank god, quiets down for the duration of both scenes and lets us listen to the actual sounds of war without any musical interference. The first scene, the Storming of Omaha Beach, is so tension-packed, exciting and simultaneously terrifying, that it could well be the best of its kind. The last one,(a small group of men versus a veritable army - hmmm,where have I seen THIS before?) is almost as good, if not for the cheap Hollywood trick at the very end, which finds the movie venturing into Indiana Jones territory. It almost seems that SPR was directed by TWO different people: Spielberg and his WWII battle consultant. On the very primal level, however, the film achieves at least one of its makers' many aspirations: when I exited the theatre, I felt lucky to be alive.