My first time watching since I was 13 after reading Anthony Beevor’s excellent book about D-Day. Saving Private Ryan is an interesting film for how much everything is defined within it’s first sequence which is the Omaha Beach scene that everyone knows. It is one of Spielberg’s best scenes in his entire filmography, his films are really controlled from a camerawork perspective usually, so to see use of such a wild camera waving and zooming from one thing to the next gives the scene the chaotic energy it needs. The whole film is immaculately constructed, Spielberg’s classical style of directing is perfect for a war film. Just enough to make everything fluid while still keeping things adequately chaotic.
The thing that drags Saving Private Ryan down for me is the tear between what Spielberg is trying to do. He has always been an entertaining director more than he has been a thematic director. Of course his work has themes, but his work has always been “exciting” (with the obvious exception of Schindler’s List and The Fabelmans and some of his other recent works). The film is trying to say something about the randomness of war, but it can’t help itself in exciting action setpieces, it makes war feel fun which is obviously not the aim, but that’s the way that Spielberg directs. The bravery of the soldiers is obviously shown well through these sequences which is the one thing it gets right thematically, every time they run in the open, it feels extremely tense because of how brutal the film is. People lose limbs on camera from grenades and are shot gruesomely in the head which lends enough credence to get across the illogical nature of war, that the chances of survival are so random it could be you or anyone else.
I don’t believe in any regard that it’s a pro-war film, but the core is off. The whole film is trying to save one person, if they find Ryan and bring him home to his mother, it will be the only decent thing they do the whole war. The whole message is that one life being saved is a noble sacrifice of others, yet there is a scene where they capture a German soldier and argue about killing him in revenge for their fallen comrade and ultimately Tom Hanks lets him go and then he comes back later and kills more of the platoon including Tom Hanks and is then killed by one of the men who argued not to earlier. So would killing this man earlier have been justified because then Tom Hanks and others wouldn’t be dead later?
Is war a random slaughter or is there an order to it? Do we value one human life more than another? The answer to what makes Ryan so special in these questions is that Ryan is an American. The film opens and closes with an American flag which leads to the implication that this was all justified because it was for America. It’s a justification for the brutality of the war, it was a war worth fighting. That’s why the Omaha Beach sequence is the most effective in the film at showing what the film also tries to say about the randomness of the violence where it’s a miracle to even have your own life at the end of it. It also shows scenes of American shooting surrendering Germans and laughing about it showing that there is a sadistic violence on both sides, we’re meant to be filled with distaste in these moments. It reminded me of the recent trend of videos of people using the excuse of pedophilia as a reason to act violent and beat the shit out of others.
Yet the scene freeing the Nazi demonstrates according to this film’s rules that sometimes killing is justified because war isn’t random at all, there’s a cosmic karma to it. Either the film is a random slaughter on both sides where the war changes people as Tom Hanks ponders at some point and survival is a miracle or it’s entirely justified by the order of things, whichever the script feels like at the current moment. So is there moral ambiguity or not? It shouldn’t have been a returning character that killed Hanks, it should have been a random person, if we were operating by the rules of returning character, Tom Hanks should have charged up the beach at the start with no bullets able to hit him like Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. Then at the end, Ryan asks “was I a good man” and it feels like the answer is superfluous, nothing separates Ryan from any of the others who make it because everyone’s survival is worth it. It’s universalist and patriotic at the same time. The war either has no meaning or it was justified to all the ones who died.
It doesn’t help that Ryan is made out whether intentionally or not to be kind of a dick, from when we first meet him where he refuses to leave to go back to his mother in favour of staying with his comrades (what a patriot) and one of the only quieter scenes is where he tells a story of a girl he refers to as extremely ugly and laughs at her embarrassment of being watched while having sexual antics and her running into a wall and getting a concussion. It doesn’t paint a good picture of the man the squad has travelled so far to save. He’s a bitch who would rather die in a conflict where his survival is luck than see his mother who has lost her three other sons and this refusal to leave ends up getting Tom Hanks and the rest of the squad basically killed. Just because we need a climatic sequence at the end of the film because as stated, Spielberg loves to entertain. Ryan was not a good man just because he had a family afterwards, his comrades died just for his survival unnecessarily. What’s more, he’s not aware of the tribulations that they came through to get him, he wasn’t on Omaha Beach or any of the other places seen which makes his scene at the end with the grave feel extremely hollow. His breakdown of “am I a good man” would make sense if there was a realisation that his actions were the thing that led to the unnecessary deaths of men who ventured through hostile territory losing their lives for his, but then he stands and salutes and we see the American flag. War is not hell if it was sentimentally patriotic, eight men losing their lives for one was worth it especially in our eyes given we didn’t see or even hear what Ryan did after the war, if he actually “earned it” except that he had a family, but then so what. Did he invent any of the inventions that Tom Hanks mentions earlier in the film like a cure for cancer or a longer lasting light bulb, we don’t know. Was saving Private Ryan the only decent thing Tom Hanks did after all just because he did for his country, not the life itself as the film seems to suggest in it’s last image.
Saving Private Ryan is generally regarded as one of Spielberg’s major works, but I find it to be rather a showing of his greatest weaknesses. A film like Munich, although that’s about espionage, not war, works better at showing senselessly brutal violence and revenge, it doesn’t hold back. The film is not something to be dismissed though, Spielberg is and will always be a master of cinematic technique, the Omaha Beach sequence is rightfully considered one of the best action sequences of all time along with every other technical detail in the film, but thematically the film is a muddled mess. A bad screenplay cannot be elevated by direction, no matter how much of a master the director happens to be.
