The other cast members are recognizable from feature films but are not the stars one expects from a summertime blockbuster. This film takes itself seriously enough to avoid the baggage attached to star personae and focuses instead on the baggage attached to war, its warriors and, most importantly, an informed late-90's audience. In filmmaker's 201, the director learns that the only thing more important than a script, is attention to detail. What one won't find in its first viewing outnumbers what it will later. Omaha Beach was a meat-grinder.
Dead cows provide decent cover.
If your gun jams, throw your helmet. If you can't fight, cry. With neither grotesquerie nor voyeurism Saving Private Ryan takes on the humanist endeavor to learn and educate. If there are places where this film falls short of its own rhetoric of 'honesty,' it is in the music. For the most part the score is inappropriate and serves only to elevate otherwise subsistent levels of emotion.