Saving Private Ryan: It's Utterly Unforgettable

I admit I was within limits underwhelmed by Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan the first time I watched it as a college freshman. In all fairness, my strange coldness to perhaps the definitive World War II movie had to do with my watching the wonderful No Country For Old Men for the first time right before, and with time and a number of repeated viewings, I came to recognize Saving Private Ryan for what it is: one of the single greatest films ever made on the subject of war. It's iconic for many good reasons, one of which is an infamous D-Day landing sequence that is quite possibly the most terrifying depiction of armed combat ever put to screen. Grippingly unsafe from horrific beginning to merciful end, it's like some cinematic gauntlet being thrown down. Though the rest of the film doesn't quite match this intensity, that might very well have been an impossible task.

Saving Private Ryan is not a narratively dense film; it is, in the true Spielberg style, more concerned about the viewer's experience. This is mostly a good thing. Rarely has a war movie ever felt so terrifyingly raw and dangerously immediate, the type of raw immediacy that makes you shrink into the couch when you see it. This immersive viscerality is helped by a lack of musical score during combat sequences, and while I in no way subscribe to the sentiment that scores are always bad, the implementation of this unsettling silence adds much to the atmosphere of Saving Private Ryan. Moreover, this movie finds an intimacy amidst all the carnage. The moving parts here are many, but it never loses sight of the feelings and personalities of the men of Easy Company.

I've heard it said that nothing in a movie can be more boring than a scene about a room full of people agreeing with each other, and Saving Private Ryan knows this. As you might have gathered from the title, this movie is about Easy Company and their mission to find and save an Army Private, James Francis Ryan, and return him home to his family following the deaths of all three of his brothers during the European landings in World War II. Nevertheless, some of the more practical souls in Easy Company aren't entirely on board with their mission, and I was drawn to these differences of opinion, an effect somewhat similar to - if not as intense as - Robert Stone's best-picture winner Platoon. It's evident that Saving Private Ryan cares deeply about its characters, and I found myself charmed by its faithful servanthood to the big but especially the small things, things like the inside joke and eventual explanation of FUBAR, one of the quips of the men of Easy Company.

It may not have reinvented the wheel, but Saving Private Ryan set the new standard for World War II movies. While it's astounding how many times its formula and tropes have been imitated in the two-and-a-half decades since its release, it's also easy to see why it became so influential. Rarely has any movie made on the topic of war been so visceral and so capable of capturing brotherhood. I wouldn't exactly call it an anti-war movie, but Saving Private Ryan did usher in a new generation of war flick, a generation more somber and contemplative than the one before. And when you think about what a war is and about the sacrifice laid at the altar of fighting one, this is an altogether welcome sentiment.

Saving Private Ryan - 9/10

Luke 15:3-7