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Saving Private Ryan - DTS Customer Reviews (19 - 21 of 37 Reviews)
War IS Hell
As Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, and Oliver Stone have showed before, war IS hell--not a glamorized John-Wayne-beats-the-bad-guys cornball cliche. And in 1998, after all the glamorizing of war by actors like Arnold Schwarzenneger and the like, Steven Spielberg joined the fray with his incredible epic SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.
Though bookended with the aging Private James Ryan and his family visiting a war memorial in France, the film opens with a stunning recreation of the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, where thousands of troops storm Omaha Beach, led by such fine actors as Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, and Edward Burns. Before they even set foot on the beach, however, the German guns on the top of the bluff overlooking it open fire, and instantly it becomes a firestorm of ferocious proportions, with much in the way of blood, gore, and painful death. This stunning sequence, lasting some twenty-four minutes, ranks right up there with such films as THE WILD BUNCH and FULL METAL JACKET for depicting the sheer horrors of war.
The bulk of Spielberg's film focuses on Hanks leading his platoon into deepest Nazi-occupied France on a mission to save a young paratrooper (Matt Damon) who has lost three brothers to combat in other theatres of World War II and has now been given his ticket home. One may not think this makes for a very good or even exciting movie in conventional action terms. As for drama and characterization, however, it is splendid. The siege of the bombed-out French town that concludes this film is nearly as good as the opening D-Day storming.
Spielberg humanizes his characters as he has done in virtually every film he has made; we are made to care about these men and what they stand for. In the end, this makes the violence and death of war much more painful to contemplate than the glamor of a Schwarzenneger or a John Wayne right-wing tract. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is, incredibly, yet another masterpiece from the pre-eminent American film maker of our time.
Thanks for double-dipping...
I'm so sick of studios releasing multiple dvds of the same film. I bought the first edition of SPR when it came out. Instead of taking the time to do it right back then, you wait until now to try to leach more money out of fans of the film. Guess what, I'm not buying it. I will rent it to check out the special features, but you won't get my money twice. It may be good business for you Dreamworks, but it isn't good public relations.
a film to remember
Saving Private Ryan is by far the most amazingly spectacular film I have ever seen. In addition to delivering an important anti-war message, it also delivers an important series of facts of what the Second World War was like for the average American foot soldier. D-Day has often been described as a 100% successful operation, basically a breeze for our troops and the British. In truth, however, over 8,000 Allied troops lost their lives that day, compared with only 5,000 Germans. 2,000 men alone died on Omaha Beach. While the D-Day objective for the troops landing on Omaha was to drive five miles inland, they were stopped after about about a half a mile. The Germans were not the incompetent poor soldiers as portrayed in some WW2 movies, they were a savagely effective fighting force. The film, does an excellent job of removing these misconceptions. I remember walking out of the theater after the film's conclusion and seeing several veterans weeping, being comforted by their families. Sights such as these immediately helped my understanding of how powerful this movie truly is. A sight like that is powerful for anyone to see, much less an 18 year old like me. I believe that this movie is a story that needs to be told. It is to World War II what All Quiet on the Western Front is to World War I, and Platoon to Vietnam. This is not a movie you should see, it is a movie you MUST see.
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