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Saving Private Ryan (D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition) Customer Reviews (85 - 87 of 89 Reviews)

Horrible
Dopey World War II movie with Friday the 13th style special effects, (...) and inaccurate weapons information.
Try banging a 60mm mortar round's primer(base) on something, your hand will be blown off.

Unforgettable. The best war film ever made.
Some people advise others to close their eyes during the loooong opening scene of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. That would be a mistake. Yes, it's carnage, it's horrible, it's relentless, it's bloody, it's random death, it's a portrayal of fear and courage and raw coincidence. But it's also one of the most powerful pieces of cinematography ever filmed.
There are many other scenes that have stayed with me during the years since I last saw this unforgettable film, perhaps Spielberg's best ever. Perhaps the most poignant one that comes immediately to mind is the woman whose sons are all away at war. She's on a remote farm, washing dishes, and thru her window she sees the dust of approaching cars. She goes outside to meet the visitors, tenses as she sees military brass and a chaplain step from the cars, then crumples wordlessly to the worn boards of her front porch as she tries to take in the news: all her boys have been killed, except for one: Private Ryan.
Another related scene, the one that came just before this one, is equally gut-wrenching (and in both scenes, there is no dialogue, just heart-stabbing visuals that are more powerful than any words could have been) as a woman charged with sending out letters of the We Regret to Inform You variety realizes that she's seen three letters with the same address within the past few days, and she takes this terrible proof to her supervisor - and thus is born the search for the surviving son, to bring him home to his momma.
Tom Hanks, with his own persona of morality and honesty, is perfectly cast as the good Captain Miller, a soldier's soldier charged with this onerous task, and of course there is terrible cost.
Saving Private Ryan is the film Spielberg HAD to make. Outstanding, in every possible way.

It's no Band of Brothers
Beautifully shot, especially the opening sequence on D-Day, but ultimately, there's one glaring flaw in this movie. Steven Spielberg just doesn't understand the army. If the Chief of Staff wanted to pull a private out of a line unit in another theater of operations, he wouldn't dispatch a squad of rangers to go traipsing around the French countryside to find him. The C-of-S would contact the theater commander, who would then contact the corps commander, who would contact the division commander, the brigade commander, the battalion commander and finally, the company commander, who would send his first sergeant to find the soldier and get him out of the Area of Operations, or AO. In fact, this is how it happened to the real private Ryan (it's documented in the book, "Band of Brothers"). Why does this matter? Because the rangers spend most of the movie complaining about how the army clearly values this Private Ryan's life over theirs, and if a commander ordered them on a mission like this, they'd be right, but no commander with half a brain would do it.
It's important to remember that when he was first promoting it, Spielberg tried to sell Private Ryan as an antiwar movie, and in antiwar epics, American officers do blown-brain things like wasting lives for no reason. The reality is that most commanders won't send their men out on pointless missions, but don't try to sell that in Hollywood.

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