Movie Reviews

Saving Private Ryan

"Saving Private Ryan" is a 1998 war movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks as Captain John Miller, and Matt Damon as Private James Ryan. This movie lasts 2h50 and takes place in Normandy, on and after the D-Day.
This film starts off pretty strongly, with about 45 minutes spent on the D-Day on Omaha beach. They are very intense, not to say epic. I'm not a war expert but I felt like everything was pretty well realized and thought through, too. We see all the soldiers, looking alike, more or less motivated for the battle awaiting. While the very beginning is quite calm, as the boats slowly float toward the coast, we are thrown into action very quickly as most soldiers present die within the first few seconds, sometimes quickly and quietly, sometimes by crying out and bleeding out for what we assume are very long minutes. Another element, that we rarely see in war movies, is introduced: the medics. It's terrible because their work feels so vain. Injecting morphine to a soldier whose intestines are hanging out? On that note, this movie is quite gory, which surprisingly enough is rarely dared that much in war movies. Anyways, a few surviving soldiers from various units eventually manage to take Omaha Beach from the Germans. One character stands out: Captain John Miller. Secretive and task-focused, he doesn't necessarily make for an attractive main character, but I assume that making the main character of a war movie an original outcast would lose meaning. After the initial action, starts the real quest that the movie is about: saving Private Ryan. The Ryan family has four adult sons, all drafted for World War II. They have all died in battle, except for the youngest, James. In an effort to reduce the emotional strain on their mother, army higher ups decide to find James in France and to bring him back to his family. With this goal in mind, an 8-men rescue team led by Miller is set up. Now, eight men risking their lives to save one seems… how can I say it… unnecessary, and, quite frankly, unlikely. Even the characters in the story bring it up, so that's quite the unusual plot. I guess an explanation I could find to that is to represent how vain wars can be, but I wouldn't bet on it, since it is not the American way of thinking at all. Anyways, they leave on their merry way to find Private Ryan. He was parachuted but apparently missed his landing point, and so, the team needs to investigate to find him. Now a jump in movie time. They eventually find Private James Ryan, but he doesn't want to come back home! He wants to stay and protect a strategic bridge through which Germans are sure to pass. The remainder of Miller's team decides to stay and help them as well. The last 30 minutes of the movie are spent in another intense battle between the American soldiers gathered there and a German unit that completely outnumbers them.
So, as I mentioned, there is an epic action at the beginning for about 45 minutes, and another epic action at the end for about 30 minutes. Then, what about the hour and a half (at least) in the middle? Well, that's kind of where this film lost me. Unfortunately, it fell in a repetitive cycle trap in my opinion. The team goes through nature, there's a battle, they lose one of their own. They go through more nature, there's another battle, they lose another one of their own. Of course, the nature varies, being fields or forest; and of course, the battle varies, being an ambush or straight up attacking a patrolling tank. But the pattern is a bit too visible for me, and I got bored. Now, during the more quiet parts, the soldiers share some anecdotes; but we are pretty far from the brotherhood known to be shared between soldiers in World War II. I'm not sure if this movie is meant to depict war more accurately than everything we have been told, but in that sense, it feels off to me. There were a few interesting scenes however, such as seeing them search through hundreds of dog tags for Ryan's name, or the French family who lives in a torn apart house and give their daughter to the soldiers in hopes that she will be saved. But overall, this movie wasn't exactly what I would expect from a war movie (which, again, might be its goal so I'm not sure). It is a good movie, especially for that time period for which there are many documentaries but not so much fiction; but I guess I wasn't so sensitive to it.