SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
A Movie Review by David Kerr
*** / ****
After being bombarded by Dreamworks SKG advertisements, I eagerly awaited Spielberg's latest movie about World War II: Saving Private Ryan. After the opening scene (which seems like they added it in at the last minute), the audience is treated to the invasion at Omaha Beach. Subjected is probably a better word, for when the plank is lowered on the first boat all the men on board are slaughtered by German machine guns, spraying blood on the camera lens.
This first horrifying scene led me to expect more of the same. Ten minutes in I was so utterly engrossed with the movie that I was convinced, "this is going to be the best war movie ever". Unfortunately it soon degenerates into your standard Hollywood flick about a band of charismatic war buddies. While the movie becomes basically average after the first half hour - getting repetitive and boring, then exciting, then looping round again - the superb opening sequence and technical excellence pushes the rating from an average two stars to a decent three. While Saving Private Ryan is probably the best war movie since Platoon, it has many shortcomings.
The problems I have with this movie are: it is a predictable Hollywood movie that takes little risks and comes dangerously close to glorifying war. I shouldn't let my political ideologies get in the way of this review, but it seems to me that the intention of Spielberg was, at least, to show that war is ugly. If that was his intention, he failed. For example, a few gruesome death scenes are played for laughs. Three scenes in the opening battle come to mind: a man picking up his arm and running around with it, a man shot in the head after just being medically stabilized, and a man shot in the head after being saved by his helmet. The latter two caused an uncomfortably high amount of laughter from the audience. Throwing in funny scenes in the middle of a tragic battle is what I call "glorifying war". This reminded me of the sad "watch people bounce off things as they fall" gags in Titanic. I'm not opposed to having such scenes in movies, I just think they destroy the overall message and are a cheap way to make audiences like the movie. Consider the emotional impact that Titanic would have had if the person twirling off the rotor blade was the young woman whose falling death was the only one not shown. The same should have been applied to Saving Private Ryan. If you are going to show a funny death scene that isn't supposed to be funny, then give the audience an emotional attachment. Otherwise people will laugh.
To make war look even more fun, all the noble characters are happy to fight, and if they aren't noble enough to fight they eventually become go-lucky war heroes by the end. The dramatic music cues when our heroes do the right thing kind of gives this away. A lot of this movie would have been better without these cues (or possibly no soundtrack at all since this is all it is used for).
Finally we see the brave Christian sniper who is having a heck of a time praying to his god before each kill. It would be very interesting to know if Spielberg is showing that theism can be abused or if he is trying to show that the allies in WWII actually had God on their side. There are plenty of shots showing the U.S. troops carrying crosses and praying yet presents the Germans as godless heathens. I think a less biased, less forced, and less ignorant approach to this subject is needed.
Perhaps these scenes went above my head and were played satirically to show the insanity and stupidity of war. If so, it went over the heads of most of the audience as well, and I wasn't even laughing! Saving Private Ryan being an extreme satire certainly is a possibility - it happened recently with Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. Verhoeven wasn't actually pushing the fascist message of the film, but trying to show how ridiculous it was (see the directors commentary on DVD). Ironically, a lot of people came out agreeing with the "message" of the film - I hope the same doesn't happen with Saving Private Ryan!
Another tiresome device used by Spielberg is making sure the audience goes through a long drawn out process of making sure we know someone essential to the plot is going to die, while anyone given little screen time has a quick and unexpected death.
These gripes aside, let me dwell on what I liked about the movie. Usually reviewers talk about what they like first and what they didn't like second. Not me. The technical excellence of this movie is incredible; from staging incredible pyrotechnic battle scenes to using a multitude of film stock, war on film hasn't look more realistic. The camera gets a bit MTV-ish at times but it is almost always used as a good confusion effect. Overall the cinematography by Janusz Kaminski is perfect.
The weapons and tanks all look incredibly realistic, and I mean realistic. I wonder if they used actual equipment from the period. I'm also wondering if there were any computer generated effects - if there were I couldn't tell. Some of the bullets whizzing through the air leave a yellow streak though - this seemed a bit strange and was probably a computer effect. Since these streaks all match the various film stocks you have to commend the effects team for a wonderful job. The sound is also loud, thunderous, and uses multi-channel effects well. Furthermore the guns all have distinct sounds, and this also impressed me.
A couple classic lines: "If one of my men dies, doesn't that mean I've saved two more?" "If God is on our side, then who could be on the other?"
Where Spielberg does take some risks and shows his directorial talent is showing some insignificant characters in pain and suffering. Most war movies just show casualties lie down quietly and peacefully as if they had spontaneously fallen asleep during the battle. I have to thank him for making this decision as this gives the movie a needed dose of human realism. Another bonus is that some of the characters are not cardboard stereotypes. Tom Sizemore, Edwards Burns, and Tom Hanks are good in their roles and both make unpredictable decisions (a lot of POW killing in this movie). Yet there are even more cardboard characters: the humanistic wimp who becomes a tough soldier, the lovable young hotshot sniper, and of course the rest are tough and rambunctious grunts who don't seem to have any thoughts about war at all.
This movies message basically boils down to: pro-patriotism, pro-American, and leans slightly towards pro-war. Whether you have a problem with those things is your own concern. If you'd rather not see them, I suggest some real anti-war movies: Platoon, Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, or even Spielberg's own Schindler's List. If you are a war movie buff like me then by all means rush out to see it. The battle scenes, at least, are technically excellent and the chance to see the opening fifteen minutes on a big screen shouldn't be passed up. Heck, it even has a cameo by Captain Dale Dye!
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