. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
A film review by Christopher Null
Copyright 1998 Christopher Null
At this point, I don't know what I'd say about SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, even if I hadn't liked it.
Undoubtedly this year's hype leader among "quality" pictures, RYAN hasn't garnered a word of bad buzz aside from the stern and dire warnings about its overwhelming violence content. It's no lie: RYAN may be one of the goriest films ever made - it will certainly be the goriest to ever win an Oscar (which will come in droves: I predict seven).
An excellent companion piece to SCHINDLER'S LIST, Spielberg has obviously poured his heart into this movie. The well-known story of a small group's search for James Ryan (Damon), whose three brothers were killed nearly simultaneously, is as simple and as powerful as they come.
The battle scenes, which encompass probably 100 minutes of the circa 160-minute running time, are epic in proportion. The idle moments in between are also worth your attention, although, in the end and in retrospect, they can seem a bit pithy on occasion, especially the bookend scenes of the elderly Ryan returning to Normandy to pay his respects. For Speilberg, there's no such thing as going too far to get you to cry.
Still, RYAN's easily a top contender for best film of the year, thanks to the gut-wrenching realism that pervades every scene of the picture. I only hope Spielberg can come to grips with the remnants of JURASSIC PARK that still must linger in his blood, making him take the easy-cheesy way out (eg. the planes from above that save the day) when working through the actual story gets a bit too hairy.
RATING: ****1/2
|------------------------------|
\ ***** Perfection \
\ **** Good, memorable film \
\ *** Average, hits and misses \
\ ** Sub-par on many levels \
\ * Unquestionably awful \
|------------------------------|
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Steven Spielberg Producer: Ian Bryce, Mark Gordon, Gary Levinsohn, Steven Spielberg Writer: Robert Rodat Starring: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Jeremy Davies
http://www.rzm.com/pvt.ryan/
-Christopher Null / null@sirius.com / Writer-Producer / http://www.filmcritic.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews