Absolutely stunning
But take heart. I wouldn't say the tide is turning, but there seems to be an uptick on the quality scale. Lately there's been LA Confidential , Titanic, and The Truman Show . And now Saving Private Ryan gets added to the el-primo list.
No one can accuse Spielberg of a lack of range--all the way from the jaw-droppingly badly written Lost World F/X fest to the brilliant Holocaust epic, Schindler's List. Spielberg does likewise with Ryan, his take on D-day and the following few days.
Ryan's plot is a squad of soldiers who have been ordered to find Ryan and get him home. Reason: his three other brothers are KIA and the US Army's compassion is not about to let his family's line die with him.
Tom Hanks is the captain who leads his squad of seven men behind enemy lines to find Ryan. As usual, Hanks pulls in a fine performance. An Oscar nom for Best Actor is virtually guaranteed.
Much has been made of the level of violence in Ryan. How the MPAA was ready to give the movie an NC17 rating ove its harrowing, pull-no-punches D-day invasion sequence until Spielberg allegedly muscled them to an R rating.
It's like this: the invasion sequence is the most gut-wrenching war movie footage ever filmed. Bodies are shredded. Limbs are blown off. Men drown. All are things which happened. It's the recreation of actual events. Period.
I draw lines over movie violence. There's realistic and then there's gratuitous. A slasher flick with nubile coeds being hacked to death is sick, gratuitous violence. Ryan is realism. I would have no qualms with a high school freshman class attending this motion picture so they can learn as near as one can get to first-hand just how harrowing war truly is. It's not violence--it's actuality.
The squad voices their concerns over the poor math of the mission--risk eight lives to save one. Hanks has a speech to answer than conumdrum.
Saving Private Ryan is nearly perfect. The battle sequences play for real--the explosions are loud, gore happens and men are driven deaf by their proximity. There's no music during the battles. Dialogue can't even be discerned at times due the noise and chaos.
Ryan suffers one misstep. The writer just had to throw in a character who's a sensitive, bumbling, chickenshit. As if we haven't seen that a million times before.
But that's just a quibble. This movie is not a masterpiece yet. To be so, Saving Private Ryan must withstand the test of time. Which it will. A Best Picture nomination is guaranteed and as of July '98, it's tough to see how this motion picture can lose.
Movie's suitability for: