Saving Private Ryan (1998, R)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Grade: B+

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is a film to be reckoned with.  It delivers scenes of sheer supremacy in the first half hour, and the last half hour.  In other words, Spielberg opens and closes Saving Private Ryan with direct, enforcing command.  Screenwriter Robert Rodat offers a solid, original war story at hand, and that I believe is a component of what propelled the film to critical and box-office recognition.  The plot of Saving Private Ryan is something to what most people can relate to: a soldier has lost his three brothers to combat, and a rescue mission is sent out to find him and make sure he gets home. For most, if not all, people who have friends and relatives honorably serving overseas, Saving Private Ryan will be a personal film that brings heart-breaking sensation to the soul.

After condensing the day-long Battle of Omaha Beach into a half hour depiction that showcases war at its most realistic and horrific, the film sets the plot into motion.  Basically, Private James Ryan has lost his three brothers in combat, two on D-Day and the third at the Battle of New Guinea, and because of the Sole Survivor Policy, an Army Ranger squad is sent out to locate Ryan and make sure he gets home to his mother.  

There’s a lot of story, as plain and simple as it is, involved in Saving Private Ryan, and like I said, one that most people can relate to.  The film follows each soldier in the seven-man squad during the quest to find Ryan, with absolutely not near as much depth that could be infused into them, but still with enough profundity as to allow us to get to know them for the meanwhile. 

The entire film feels genuinely authentic, especially the two major battle scenes, the Battle of Omaha Beach and the fictional Battle of Ramelle.  Spielberg is an ambitious filmmaker in that he is willing to follow the footsteps made by Oliver Stone in Platoon and John Irvin for Hamburger Hill to showcase war at its most gritty and unflinching, and to transform that into a memorable experience.  Saving Private Ryan is both disturbing and graphic, but all the gore is absolutely necessary in order to give a showcase for what war really is on the inside and out.  Platoon and Hamburger Hill were all about showing how bad Vietnam was; Saving Private Ryan is all about showing how bad World War II was.  Contrasting the three films for me is erroneously difficult, perhaps because, as of now, I have yet to view either Platoon or Hamburger Hill.  I have heard and read more then enough about them.  Rest assured, I hope to have both films watched, graded and reviewed as soon as I can.

Saving Private Ryan makes a wise step in that it does not glorify war.  All the political mess surrounding World War II sit in the very, very back row.  Sitting up front is the stench of battle itself from the average soldier’s viewpoint.  However, the film does waver just a little between whether it’s anti-war and not anti-war; though by all means, it is not a pro-war film.  The battle sequences alone, and the men's discussions on the guys they have lost, get the point across that battlefield is no friendly place to be in: war is bad. In another scene though, Hanks's character explains how he's lost 94 men under his command across the battlefields of North Africa, Sicily, Italy and now Normandy, but how he knows he's saved the lives of at least ten times that number.  So is Saving Private Ryan, anti-war, or is it somewhere in the margin of being in between anti-war and non anti-war?  Unfortunately, Spielberg leaves this for us to decide, when it should have been he who chose to get the definitive position across.

Really, Saving Private Ryan was the film that re-energized worldwide interest in World War II, and it shall always be remembered mostly for that.  Since the highly successful release of the film in 1998, there have been many other war films that try to retrace Saving Private Ryan’s footsteps in showing the gritty, brutal side of war, two of which quite succeeded at that: Black Hawk Down and Letters from Iwo Jima; Letters from Iwo Jima to the point of being Saving Private Ryan’s equal.

Saving Private Ryan is a very memorable motion picture, and it’s likely to leave one of the most earnest impacts upon you of any war film.  Spielberg becomes very adept at pacing: Saving Private Ryan is nearly three hours long and to me; it felt like no more than two. Nevertheless, it does succumb to a few war clichés and flaws in dialogue and character disposition here and there, almost all of which are in between the opening and closing half hours, which again I will state are extraordinary experiences. 

The war clichés present in the dialogue and the characters here and there throughout the piece are easy enough to ignore.  However, something I must ask is this: would Saving Private Ryan have been as comittted to our memories if the Omaha Beach sequence was eliminated from the final product?  My answer to my own question is that Saving Private Ryan is really a traditional piece of work that just sets the bar a little higher by having evident visualization from it's director.

Saving Private Ryan completely succeeds in its center goal of bringing worldwide attention to how bad war is and that we have fathers, brothers and sons all fighting and dying for our freedom out there, though even if whether Saving Private Ryan is an anti-war film or not is rather tough to tell.  Either way I look at it, I do come to a reverent conclusion, and that is that Saving Private Ryan becomes a coherent and solid, even if conformist, war film. 

B+