Am I really the only person who isn't raving about this movie as being the best war film ever and a lot more besides? I'm not saying I don't like it, which I do, a bit, but it does not deserve its reputation. Saving Private Ryan is fairly typical Spielberg fare, quite suspenseful, with well-directed action scenes, but with mostly cardboard characters and not much plot. There's really very little plot in this movie. A group of eight soldiers led by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) are sent to get one soldier, Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) out of the war in Northern France soon after D-Day because Ryan's three brothers have been killed and the military chiefs want to send something home to his mother. They find Ryan and then when he refuses to leave his group, help them to defend a bridge against a German counter-attack. That's basically it, although there are some very realistic battle scenes, particularly the landings on the beaches at Normandy at the start of the movie. The battle scenes are very realistic, but I wish to make two points here: One, they were mostly computer-generated, which in some cases was obvious, and two, I don't really rate realistic bullet-wounds or rampaging dinosaurs very highly compared to quality of acting, script and development of character. People looking for entertainment and popcorn fodder may disagree, but I think of cinema as an art form.
My point is this, if you take away those action scenes and footage of bodies being blown apart, what do you have left? Not much, a film that is slight, long, boring and saved only by Hank's stirring performance. The problem with movies such as this and Schindler's List is akin to the story of the Emperor's New Clothes: no one dares criticise because of the subject matter and because they do not want to be criticised themselves. If you lifted Saving Private Ryan to Los Angeles and had rival street gangs blasting the hell out of each other would people acclaim it as a masterpiece? Of course not, even if it did boast the most realistic battle scenes ever filmed. With Schindler's List, because of the sensitive subject of Jews being slaughtered it is again acclaimed. The movie Philadelphia won an Oscar for Tom Hanks because it was the first major movie to tackle AIDS. I'm not saying these are not good movies. They are good, but they have been elevated to a much higher status because of what they are, rather than how well they do it. This is not helped by the fact that most movies today and indeed the vast majority of all movies are so unbelievably bad that when something like Good Will Hunting of The Shawshank Redemption comes along cinemagoers are confused, because let's face it they are a pretty stupid bunch. So they rave about it, for lack of anything else to do.
So, back to Saving Private Ryan. War movies are not necessarily a bad thing, (although you have to wonder whether it's a bit sick to make movies and entertainment out of a conflict that killed millions upon millions of people and left mental scars on millions of others) but they must have something other than just fighting, bloodshed, big guns, tanks, and rubble. You have to care whether the characters live or die, and in this movie I really didn't, except for Captain Miller, an English teacher from Pennsylvania. There were some nice moments, particularly the German machine-gunner pleading for his life, and Tom Hanks shooting pathetically at the tank with his service revolver, and I have to say that despite the movie's length, I was never really bored. But the worst things, I think are that none of the other actors really stood out, and that there was no real point to the whole thing. And the stupid present day scenes with an old Private Ryan visiting the graves of his fellow soldiers seemed to have no point either, other than to appeal to a sentimental audience. There are times when having older versions of characters works, (Titanic), and times when it doesn't work so well (Mediterraneo). The main problem with this movie is that it didn't move me like it should do to qualify as a work of art, like any other work of art.
written by Ed in September 1998