Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
With Tom Hanks and Matt Damon
Screening everywhere
Review by Graham Matthews
Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is an extremely impressive film. It's meant to be. From the very first frames, you get the message. It's not subtle and it's not pretty, but it is pretty obvious.
The story is by now well known. A group of D-Day veterans is sent on a mission to find a private who is to be returned "home" to mom and apple pie in the US midwest because his three brothers have all been killed in action fighting the universal enemy.
Private Ryan is as different a war film as you're likely to see. It has none of the depth or pathos of such classic films as All Quiet on the Western Front, Stalingrad or even Gallipoli.
There is almost no character development at all; our heroes are like plastic soldiers from a box. They are defined simply by what they do — captain, sergeant, sniper.
As a result, it is impossible to develop an attachment to any of them. Their life or death is meaningless against the success of "the mission". The "enemy" are nothing more than figures in an arcade game to be shot before they shoot you.
The film begins at so-called Omaha Beach — a botched D-Day landing in which US casualties were very high. Yet under Spielberg's spell, the gritty realism of the landings erases any question of military incompetence. The intricate attention to detail that went into recreating so many individual deaths hides the larger picture of tactical ineptitude.
The massive waste of human life is uncritically portrayed. Men die almost stoically, and at the end of the day everyone knows that it just had to be.
Perhaps the most insidious feature of Saving Private Ryan is its complete lack of doubt. Plastic soldiers fight, die, become drenched in the ocean and rain storms, are forced to make morally invidious decisions, but inevitably all is forgiven as long as they do their duty.
It is a film that could not have been made about any other war but World War II. It portrays the US absolutely united against a foreign foe in a way that was not possible in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq.
Soldiers are not killed by friendly fire or doused with toxic chemicals. They do not question orders or defy their officers.
See Saving Private Ryan on the big screen, if only to see what all the hype has been about. But after you've seen the film, it will not be the too-real portrayal of military carnage that makes you feel slightly queasy. It will be the not-very-hidden moral of the story — unquestioning loyalty to Uncle Sam.