This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Academy Awards - best picture winners and nominees, Action, Drama, S, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Giovanni Ribisi, Matt Damon, Jeremy Davies, Vin Diesel, Ted Danson, Paul Giamatti, Dennis Farina.
This film starts out with the most powerful twenty minutes of footage that Hollywood has ever produced as Spielberg re-creates D-day with such skill that we all feel it. This alone would make this an impressive effort, but it soon launches into a simple, but strong, action/war drama that is loaded with strong, individual characters with such depth that will make you feel angry, sad, laugh and generally feel like these were people that you knew. The acting is uniformly strong, and is aided by talented veteran performers in small roles, throughout. Spielberg uses a jerky, and, sometimes, grainy camera style that adds to the realism. This is a tricky style to employ. It is effective when done well, but distracting and unpleasant when overdone (Check out the Bourne Supremacy for how NOT to do it). Even the sound (and lack of it) adds to the power of this film. The action scenes are shocking, quick, random and brutal. When the action stops, the story is full of natural dialogue and tension and even has some humor.
Saving Private Ryan seizes you from the early scenes on Omaha Beach and holds you as Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks) is assigned to assemble a squad to go find Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) and ship him home because his four brothers, also serving, have all been killed. As an act of mercy, the Army wants to send him home. The men set out on this “public relations mission” across the dangerous French countryside, reluctantly. The story includes action and internal conflict and camaraderie and the viewer is never sure what will happen next, right up to the final scenes.
This is the best war movie ever made and is one of the best movies of all time on top of that. It is one of the Maniac’s all-time favorites and a must for any movie collection. The screenplay should be required study for writers who want to create a large cast movie and not rely on stock, one-dimensional characters and the film should be required viewing for students looking to gain some measure of understanding of the sacrifices of those who served in World War II. When Spielberg puts his heart into a project, there can be no better director and in this case, there is no better movie.
