Powerful, honest, brutal - Saving Private Ryan Reviews

Steven Spielberg shows us *how* a World War II movie is done -- by keeping horror front and center in this D-Day story about eight men sent SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. His three brothers have died in action and the army realizes that the loss of *all* her sons is too much to ask of one mother. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was immediately validated by WWII veterans as Hollywood's closest approximation to the sensory experience of war, with its graphic, grotesque depictions of battle from individualized perspectives. The touch of authenticity is that we meet these guys as real people before they die, and their deaths are not entertainment; they are awful. For twenty-four minutes at the beginning of the movie, we witness the plight of the first infantry troops to land on Omaha Beach, Normandy, in occupied France, where German resistance was strongest. True to the individual focus of the film, at first we only see what the soldiers see inside their sealed landing craft as they approach the surf. The men, mostly inexperienced boys who are about to get their introduction to hostilities, are scared out of their wits. Some of them are vomiting from nervousness and sea-sickness, some are saying their Rosaries, while others stare listlessly ahead. As soon as the ramp doors of the debarkation craft open, the men are met with a relentless hail of small-arms fire from unseen, fortified positions on the beach-head that were missed by the aerial bombardment that preceded the landings (due to poor visibility related to bad weather). My visit to Point du Hoc, in Normandy earlier this year revealed the horror of this beach: the terrible command that the German defenders had, overlooking the great sweep of the beachead, and the total exposure of the liberators. In the movie, even under the waves, bubble jet streamers signal that the water was no safe place, impregnable to stray bullets, and that the men's gear was sometimes too heavy to let them get out. This half of an hour of film packs more of the experiential terror of war than the whole three hours of this year's PEARL HARBOR combined. When someone dies in RYAN, we actually care. Spielberg is aided by the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, who also furnished his talent in Spielberg's staggering SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993). SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was processed to bring out drab colors, suppressing all bright tones except red, for the vivid splashes of blood that trickle and gush out of obscene wounds. Additionally, the film-makers achieve a strobe-light effect on many of the sequences by quickly snapping the camera shutter open and close to sear each individual frame into our retinas, causing a hyper-vivid look. The film does skimp a little bit on dramatization, but these are foot-note complaints. In order to have the patrolling soldiers chat with each other and give us insights into their personalities, for instance, Spielberg has them marching much closer to each other than soldiers trying to avoid grenade and land-mine damage would march. Additionally, Spielberg resorts to clicheic devices, like an against-all-odds battle sequence at the end (which actually gets better with age, because you pick up little details that show the methodological consistency of the film). But, he does avoid one cliche -- that the good guys always make it out alive. (Carlos Colorado)