Here’s a magazine-style essay piece I wrote about Saving Private Ryan. It’s kind of rambling (1198 words) and won’t make sense unless you’ve seen the film (maybe spoilers for the opening scenes and general plot later on), but I got an A* for it, so I don’t care what you think. The links and pictures are added, but nothing else only a typo has been changed.
Saving Private Ryan came at a crucial turning point in Steven Spielberg’s career. Previously reliably known for his perfect for children yet artistically-unfulfilling chain of blockbusters, this, along with 1993’s Schindler’s List, marked a change of direction into serious historical territory. While awards had always been forthcoming – E.T. was up against Gandhi for Best Picture Oscar® 1983 (Gandhi won, thankfully) – Saving Private Ryan was that rare blend, particularly seen in war movies, of critical acclaim and box offices success, mixing and matching the heady thrill of battles with moral theorizing, often at the same time.
Left to right foreground: Tom Sizemore, Tom Hanks as soldiers on the boats at D-Day
There’s little indication of this to start with. After a mercilessly long and pointless opening with some old dude, the movie proper begins. June 6th, 1944. The date is already ringing a bell. The beach is covered in iron anti-tank crosses. This is Omaha, and the Normandy beach landings are about to begin, now well-known as D-Day. Spielberg mentioned in an interview that his father, who fought in Burma during WW2, used to say, “Nobody ever makes a movie about my war except as an excuse to do action.” Perhaps it was this particular misrepresentation that Steven Spielberg wanted to correct for a modern-day audience with Saving Private Ryan.
The most striking and immediate way that this is achieved in the opening scene is with the camera. Hand-held photography, or “shaky-cam” in common parlance, is employed throughout, creating the feel of a Signal Corps cameraman. These dedicated photographers of still and moving film were there with the soldiers during the real landing at Omaha beach and other military operations, documenting all that transpired for the benefit of the people at home and in the future. Certain shots, where the camera falls over, ducks for cover, or hesitates before running alongside the actors, were deliberately edited into the final film, as well as brief moments when blood or sand cover the camera lens. This makes for a lot of disorientation, confusion, and ultimately the sense that we, the viewers, are there, fighting (or hiding at least) with the characters that we will come to know very personally by the end of the film.
The real D-Day
The whistle sounds. No more time for the little people, this is war on a grand scale. And yet we never lose sight of the individual. As they are shot, maimed, search for their own body parts, cry for far away parents, they are still people. Cut to the other side. The German soldiers are firing relentlessly, but they are all in silhouette. The landings are far away, not so much visually (an extra long lens helps fix that), but personally. We’ve lost the humanity. The enemy have no humanity. This, what propaganda has dictated for decades, is how you deal with the horrors of war. They are your enemy. Don’t get to know them, perhaps they are not even recognizably human. Of course, in reality, this works out very differently, as seen when the principal characters encounter a German later in the film, and no-one knows how to deal with him.
After the initial wave of dead bodies, the humanization of the soldiers continues. A shell explodes next to Tom Hanks, and for a few minutes, he is practically deaf, a hollow ringing in his ears (and in the audience’s through some inspired sound design and mixing). From his point of view, we see people carrying a flame-thrower being engulfed in flames and a soldier searching for his lost arm. He picks up his helmet, tipping out a large volume of mingled water and blood, and returns it to his head. Someone asks for orders. He can’t hear. He is helpless. And likewise, we the audience are helpless, unable to jump through the silver screen and re-assert a peaceful order of things. All we, Sergeant Miller and us, can do is watch, voyeurs to the brutal carnage around us, as our friends from beforehand and acquaintances from the brief time on the boat are cut down all around us. The slow-motion lends a sense of heightened senses and reality, making it all the more torturous being unable to help them.
Basically it’s saying upfront: this movie doesn’t mess around.
The rest of the film rides on the initial strength. For those who don’t know, it chronicles the story of Tom Hanks’ character Capt. John H. Miller, who recruits a rag-tag team of misfit US soldier after the D-Day landings to rescue one James Francis Ryan as he’s the last of three brothers left alive after the Normandy campaign in World War 2.
As the D-Day scene wraps up the loose ends, the weary viewer is unwillingly confronted with the same horrific sight as Tom Hanks; the dead, the dying, the futility of war; and as the sweeping emotional score interjects to yank at the heartstrings, the bloodshed and carnage recedes into the faded-sepia toned memory of the past – quite like history. Saving Private Ryan has a strange relationship with history. Scrawled from the perspective of fifty years later, this presents the movie as an artifact to spur remembrance, of veterans and their comrades’ sacrifices. Post-Vietnam, an unsuccessful and controversial conflict which spawned a whole glut of war movies and their own unique sub-genre, Saving Private Ryan is a constant reminder of a completely different generation’s sacrifice.
Tom Hanks, near the end of the movie.
Although it may not take as brave a stance as, say, Johnny Got His Gun or other examples of the genre, Saving Private Ryan still has a good deal to say about war, dissecting and criticizing the act of it, yet embracing what it stands for. It’s this paradox that somehow staves the characters through the traumatic experiences they are forced into, knowing that they are fighting for a higher cause which is never questioned. Even if the chain of command, the rescue mission itself is criticized, even by Capt. Miller, it’s always imperative that they remember this: their mission is to win the war. This logic jump neatly side-steps all the intrinsic problems that the characters might have with their premise.
The value of life is revisited often throughout Saving Private Ryan. On the face of it, the plot is one expression of this – forcing a group of eight people to risk their lives to save just one. However, it is a theme also befitting war, the backdrop to which this search-and-rescue mission takes place. In one lengthy scene nearing the middle of the movie, Tom Hanks absent-mindedly recollects how he’s always been able to reassure himself that when he was sacrificing men’s lives it was to save more lives than what it cost. In this way, life becomes quantifiable, unimportant, a game of numbers and chance – and pretty big numbers at that. It’s just another way war warps the outlook and perspective of people, including the audience, who are immersed in it. In other words, everything is quite FUBAR.
Saving Private Ryan is, put simply, one of the greatest war films of all time. It deals with all the familiar themes of loyalty, death, and sacrifice, but does so maturely, bringing World War 2, which had never previously been treated in such a way, to life, in all its gory glory.
As well as this one, I also recommend: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Johnny Got His Gun (see above link for DVD trailer), A Matter of Life and Death, The Longest Day as really good war movies.
