Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Saving Private Ryan is an American war film first released in 1998, directed by Steven Spielberg.  The film stars Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper and Adam Goldberg.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Visiting the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-mer, Normandy, France, an elderly WWII veteran seeks out one particular stone cross and, in the emotional surge of the moment, relives his wartime experiences.  It is June 6th 1944.  At the start of the Allied Invasion of France, American troops make a perilous landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy.  Many soldiers are instantly cut down by persistent German artillery.  Many more survive this first ordeal and overwhelm the German infantrymen who are defending this stretch of coast.   Of the many who died on the beach, two were brothers.  A third brother of the same family, the Ryans, also died at about the same time in another campaign.  It is left to General George Marshall to notify the soldiers’ mother of the lost of her three sons.  When he learns that Mrs Ryan has a fourth son, Private James Francis Ryan, currently assigned to the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, he resolves to recall him from combat duty and send him home.   Unfortunately, the present whereabouts of Private Ryan are unknown.  Parachuted into Normandy at the start of the Allied offensive, Ryan could be anywhere, and the likelihood is that he is already dead.   Captain John H. Miller, commanding officer of Charlie Company, 2nd Ranger Battalion, receives orders to find Private Ryan and bring him home.  Having assembled a commando team that comprises himself, six Rangers and a translator, Miller begins his assignment by scouring the outskirts of Neuville, a town that had been decimated by bombing.   When the team suffer their first casualty, they start to question the sense of their mission...

A lot of things have been said about Steven Spielberg, not all of it necessarily complimentary, but no one would deny he has played a major role in shaping the cinema experience over the past three and half decades.   It was after all Spielberg who invented the summer blockbuster with Jaws (1975), following this up with a string of box office triumphs that included Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Jurassic Park (1993).  Spielberg has a genius for making films with huge mainstream appeal, to the extent that he is often dismissed as merely a commercial filmmaker, interested only in makings films that make money.  But there is another side to Spielberg, which was revealed in his Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993) and confirmed in Saving Private Ryan (1998), the auteur and provocateur who is prepared to gamble his reputation and his money by tackling difficult and serious subjects in a controversial but honest manner.   

History may judge Saving Private Ryan to be Spielberg’s most significant film.  It is the film which totally re-defined the war movie genre in the late 1990s and altered overnight audiences’ expectations of what a war movie should be and what war actually looks like.   Prior to this film, cinema tended to regard war as a fantasy genre, the subject of Boys’ Own adventures in which impeccably well-behaved good guys (usually English-speaking Caucasians) took on and defeated the archetypal baddies (most often German soldiers) in a nice clean battle in which pain and bloodshed were conspicuous by their absence.  There were one or two exceptions -  notably Robert Enrico’s The Old Gun (1975) and Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977) - which dared to show the true face of war, but these were seldom well-received by the cinema-going public, who wanted their war films to adhere to the formula of cosy escapism, with just a hint of historical verisimilitude.  Saving Private Ryan changed all that and showed the world how war should be portrayed on the big screen, not as a facile adventure in which no one is really hurt, but as a true representation of the unspeakable horror of war.

Watching the first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan is about as comfortable as being repeatedly beaten on the head by a boxing glove containing a brick.  With uncharacteristic brutality, Spielberg doesn’t even prepare his audience for the ordeal that awaits them.  After a brief opening sequence in a Normandy cemetery, we are suddenly propelled into a scene of frenzied carnage and confusion and have to endure what is probably the most harrowing 25 minutes of any film to date.  With a near-documentary realism, the film replays the Normandy beach landing (or rather, one specific part of it) so convincingly that you can feel yourself there, shivering in the cold, endlessly showered by bullets, bullets that rip soundlessly into the flesh of soldiers, soldiers who, almost paralysed by fear, struggle hopelessly to cross the thin strip of land that stands between them and a hard-won victory.  Shaky handheld camerawork and partially obscured low-angle shots serve to give the spectator the impression that he himself is caught up in this insane lottery of death.  Never before has the ferocity of battle been caught so vividly on celluloid.  When, finally, the nightmare is over, you are left stunned and half-sick by the sudden realisation of what war is really like.  War is not glamorous.  It is not a game.  It is ugly, viciously, sickeningly ugly.  Saving Private Ryan not only condemns war with an unprecedented vigour, but it also serves to raise our estimation of those who fought and died in the wars of the past century, making us aware of the true extent of the debt that we owe them and just why we continue to remember them. 

After such an explosive jaw-dropping opening salvo, what follows is bound to be something of an anti-climax.  This is the principal weakness of Saving Private Ryan - it has difficulty maintaining its momentum and ultimately becomes pretty indistinguishable from most previous war films.  It is the Omaha beach sequence that elevates it from the status of a merely good war film to a landmark piece of cinema.  Fortunately, the characters are sufficiently engaging and believable (the acting is far superior to the screenwriting), and the story sufficiently well-told, for the film to continue to hold our attention in spite of its over-ample runtime.   Periodically, the film does veer uncomfortably close to tacky sentimentality (assisted by a truly irritating score), but for the most part it adheres to its realist agenda and redeems itself with some thoughtful moments of reflection on the nature of warfare.  The scene in which soldiers struggle hopelessly to stem the blood flow of another soldier (ironically the medic of the team) after he has been shot is the film’s most poignant as it shows the sheer helplessness of those who whose job it is to kill to hold back death.  Another inspired moment occurs during the final cataclysmic battle at the end of the film, where a German soldier stabs to death an American soldier with something of the intimacy of a love scene, reminding us again of the chief absurdity of war - men killing men without any personal enmity.   Impressive as the final action sequence is, it lacks the intense visceral quality of the film’s opening battle scene and instead reverts pretty well to the classic war movie formula.

For such a groundbreaking piece of cinema, it is perhaps surprising that Saving Private Ryan proved to be such a phenomenal box office success.  To date, the film has grossed almost 500 million dollars (a healthy return on its 70 million dollar budget) and attracted the largest audience of any American film in 1998.  The film was also generally well-received by the critics but fared less well at the Oscars than it perhaps merited.  Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, the film won in just five categories: Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Sound Editing, but (incredibly) lost out to Shakespeare in Love in the Best Picture category.

Saving Private Ryan is one of those few films which demands to be seen by everyone as an essential part of his or her education.  It is a film that shows war not as we like to imagine it to be, as some great adventure, but as it really is, a supreme tragedy to be avoided at all costs.  The characters we are invited to identify with are not flawless action heroes but ordinary men who are prone to the same frailties as anyone.  Some find it hard to contain their fear, some are habitual cowards, some are so overcome by anger that they blithely commit war crimes without knowing it.  Many of those who die in battle do not die easily, but must instead endure a vicious onslaught of fear and pain before release finally comes.   A harsh testament to the absurdity and brutality of war, Saving Private Ryan is a film that cannot fail to impact, and impact deeply, on anyone who watches it.  The war movie will never be the same again.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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