Saving Private Ryan

A war film that opens with the Normandy landing. The opening runs over twenty minutes. The ramps drop on Omaha beach and the film shows war not as a landscape but as noise, sand and severed limbs. Then an order comes. Three of four brothers from one family are dead; the fourth is somewhere in France and the government wants him found and sent home. Captain Miller and seven men set out. From there the film is a search. Wrong units, emptied villages, a sniper, a radar post, and a growing objection inside the group: why are eight men being risked for one. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but arithmetic: the film leaves the question open and gives no clean answer even at the end. Who Miller is stays unsaid for a long time; his men bet on it, and when the answer comes the scene is the quietest thing in the film. The image is degraded on purpose. The shutter angle was reduced, the lens coating stripped and the colour desaturated; the result is a stuttering texture close to newsreel of the period. The landing was shot in Ireland, on a beach near Wexford, and most of the extras were reservists from the Irish army. The director shot that section without storyboards. When the film opened, some veterans had traumatic reactions in cinemas and a support line was set up in response. The cast went through a real training camp before shooting; Matt Damon was deliberately exempted, so the resentment the others felt toward him was genuine. Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi and Jeremy Davies are in the cast. Steven Spielberg directed and won the Academy Award for Best Director; the film lost Best Picture. Who it is for: anyone who wants war shown without decoration. Who it is not for: anyone sensitive to violence; the opening is heavier than expected.