Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
As U.S. troops storm the beaches of Normandy, three brothers lie dead on the battlefield, with a fourth trapped behind enemy lines. Ranger captain John Miller and seven men are tasked with penetrating German-held territory and bringing the boy home.
45 connections found
View:
45 films that influenced Saving Private Ryan
What critics say influenced Saving Private Ryan
Saving Private Ryan has earned comparisons to Oliver Stone's Platoon for its revelations of torn flesh and combat, but the whole film seems somehow closer in overall tone to Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, a chilly study of Vietnam War absurdity, or even Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
Saving Private Ryan has earned comparisons to Oliver Stone's Platoon for its revelations of torn flesh and combat, but the whole film seems somehow closer in overall tone to Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, a chilly study of Vietnam War absurdity, or even Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
This film does for World War II what Platoon and The Deer Hunter did for Vietnam.
"Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket," two films that tried to de-glorify war with unblinking doses of gruesomeness, look like Army-made public relations movies compared to this.
In many ways, the picture painted by this movie is more grim than the one Oliver Stone presented in Platoon, which has often been cited as the most daring anti-war film to come out of Hollywood.
In fierce dread and energy it's on a par with Oliver Stone's " Platoon ," and in scope surpasses it--because in the bloody early stages the landing forces and the enemy never meet eye to eye, but are simply faceless masses of men who have been ordered to shoot at one another until one side is destroyed.
Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and We Were Soldiers owe obvious debts to Platoon.
"Private Ryan" makes "The Longest Day" look like "Beach Blanket Bingo."
Though the film runs close to three hours and includes a large cast of extras and several large, meticulously staged battle scenes, it is by no means a vast, impersonal epic in the tradition of "The Longest Day.
Those recreations, which set a high standard for WWII action not fully eclipsed until Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, are the film's enduring achievement.
Considered violent and realistic when it was made, how does The Longest Day compare, in terms of both tone and on-screen brutality, to more recent combat films ( Saving Private Ryan , Lone Survivor )?
"Ryan" is more of a piece with Ken Annakin's 1962 epic, "The Longest Day," featuring an all-star cast in a retelling of the Allied invasion of Normandy--a re-creation of historical events emphasizing the actuality of battle more than an exploration of the lives of its combatants.
Nothing the soldiers do to escape or fight back is of any avail -- in fact, their efforts backfire with diabolical irony, the kind of cruel poetic injustices that mark the lumbering D-Day epic The Longest Day (1961), and more cynically that underrated paean to World War II disillusionment, The Victors (1963).
("Saving Private Ryan," as Steven Spielberg has often admitted, is yet another film directly inspired by "Samurai.")
Advertisement
They Were Expendable (1945) and The Big Red One (1980) are among the best World War II movies ever made, and were directed by men who actually served in the war (John Ford and Samuel Fuller, respectively).
Saving Private Ryan has the budget and the production values, but if you want a World War II story from a real vet’s perspective, Sam Fuller is still the man and The Big Red One, drawn from his own war experiences, is the film.
Note: I wrote the above review in 1998, just after Fuller's death and just before the release of a pair of new WWII movies, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.
(If the vast differences between The Big Red One and Steven Spielberg�s Saving Private Ryan, between which comparisons are inevitable if only because of their Omaha Beach scenes, can be reduced to a single issue, it�s this.)
Here the film establishes the kind of group camaraderie found in other war films, most notably in one of my favorites, Lewis Milestone's 1945 classic, "A Walk in the Sun."
Like the motley crew in Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun (1945), Miller's squad roam through the chaos of no man's land, bumping into anecdotes ranging from the poignant and heartstopping to the predictable and pat.
M iller's journey into the bowels of the war--through rubbled villages and fields strewn with rotting corpses--attains the surreal intensity that Francis Ford Coppola strove for in Apocalypse Now (1979), except without the self-conscious Golden Bough stabs at myth-making.
It lacks the intensity and lyrical power of "Apocalypse Now", my personal favorite.
There are several battle scenes contained in the movie that are so powerful that you watch them and think back on the sad moments of "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now."
Instead, what's offered is a variation on Apocalypse Now: a search not for the heart of darkness but for the heart of decency.
Even the most well-received examples -- The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket -- trafficked in violence and psychological devastation as though they were the only facets of the wartime experience worth exploring.
Nearly 30 years ago, Sam Peckinpah devised a massacre at the climax of The Wild Bunch that he thought would take the casualness out of killing.
Nothing like this has been seen since the shattering opening and closing episodes of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" nearly 30 years ago; "Saving Private Ryan" will be studied by film students for years.
Advertisement
(A similar, true episode, in which five brothers went down on the same ship, was dramatized in 1944 in The Sullivans.)
They Were Expendable (1945) and The Big Red One (1980) are among the best World War II movies ever made, and were directed by men who actually served in the war (John Ford and Samuel Fuller, respectively).