Saving Private Ryan brought some gravitas to a summer of loud, dumb Hollywood spectacles
Image: Graphic: Jimmy Hasse Film Features The Popcorn Champs
In November 1997, Tom Hanks and Ben Affleck were in The New York Times Magazine together. On the cover, the two of them snarled in each other’s faces, pretending they were enemies. The headline for the accompanying Lynn Hirschberg profile: “The Two Hollywoods.” Those two Hollywoods were the old studio-system mainstream and the rising tide of independent film. On that magazine cover, Ben Affleck was supposed to represent the indies.
In that moment, Hanks was easily the biggest movie star in the world. He’d just made Sleepless In Seattle, Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, and Toy Story— smashes all. He’d also won back-to-back Oscars. Hanks had cashed in some of his goodwill to make his one-for-me directorial debut, 1996’s fantastically entertaining but money-losing That Thing You Do!, but he was about to get back to the blockbuster business. Affleck, by contrast, had only just graduated from bit parts in films like Dazed And Confused and Mallrats. He’d starred in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy, and he’d co-written Good Will Hunting, which opened a couple of weeks after that Times Magazine story ran. A few months later, Affleck and his best friend would win a screenwriting Oscar together.
[pm_embed_youtube id=’LL00s6qV-P1-m3UOqGaeLIuQ’ type=’playlist’]In July 1998, in a weird echo of that Times Magazine cover, Hanks and Affleck had movies that opened a few weeks apart and went up against each other for that year’s box-office championship. This time, though, Hanks and Affleck couldn’t claim to represent two Hollywoods. Instead, both were driving grand, expensive studio spectacles. Both movies featured teams of square-jawed, wisecracking men (mostly played by actors drawn from the indie-film ranks) going into dangerous places to perform heroic tasks. Both had deafening explosions and disorienting editing and swelling throat-lump music. Both were made by populist auteurs. Both had baby boomer movie stars playing squinting, stoic leaders who sacrifice their lives, though not before giving words of wisdom to one of the young stars of Good Will Hunting.
For two films with so much in common, Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan really had nothing in common. One of these July 1998 movies was an extravagantly stupid summer brain melt, a two-and-a-half-hour adrenaline jolt. The other was a modern-classic war film, a grim, grueling trudge through human viscera. So it’s really some kind of miracle that, at least at the domestic box office, Saving Private Ryan squeaked out the win. Armageddon earned more internationally, but at least in North America, Steven Spielberg’s movie reigned supreme.
The success of Saving Private Ryan isn’t exactly baffling. After all, this was the biggest hit-generating director of all time and the biggest star of the era teaming up to make a movie about World War II heroism, a subject that never goes out of style. Spielberg had made popcorn entertainment out of Americans fighting Nazis before; with the Indiana Jones series, he’d gotten a whole franchise out of it. He’d also made an unlikely blockbuster with Schindler’s List, a punishing and painful Holocaust drama. The story of D-Day had been part of plenty of movies before Saving Private Ryan; it had, in fact, been the entire subject of The Longest Day, the highest-grossing movie of 1962. But Saving Private Ryan remains an abrasive, overwhelming onslaught of a movie. The fact that so many people paid to see it is a wonder.
I saw Saving Private Ryan on opening weekend with my dad and a girl I was dating, an extremely strange decision on my part. The opening set piece, nearly half an hour of unrelenting gore and pointless death, was almost psychedelic in its horror. It felt like a mid-’90s death metal album cover come to life. It wasn’t like that long Normandy Beach sequence was a surprise; everyone who’d read anything about the movie knew to expect it. But knowing about the sequence and actually sitting through it were two very different things.
It was all just fucking horrible. In individual shots, Spielberg would tell bleak, hellish little stories. Guys get chopped up like meat before they even get off their boats. Others get ventilated while they’re still floating in the water. One soldier looks around aimlessly on the ground for a few seconds, then picks up his own severed arm, like he can somehow fix himself. Another feels a round ricochet off his helmet, then stares around in wonder at his own survival before immediately getting another bullet through his brain anyway. Amidst it all, we see Tom Hanks’ Captain John Miller, feeling as rattled and terrified as everyone else but still trying to formulate a coherent battle plan amidst all the chaos.
There were things in those opening scenes that I’d never seen before. Gore spattering on camera lenses. Oceans turning red with blood. American soldiers happily murdering any enemies who tried to surrender. To watch those scenes is to wonder how you’d do in those situations, to consider how long you’d last before dying some horrible death of your own. This was clearly the intent.
Spielberg talked about refusing entry to anyone who showed up late to Saving Private Ryan, though I don’t know how any multiplexes would’ve enforced that. Spielberg wanted to put everyone through it. He wanted everyone to think about the hell he was putting up on screen and about the actual people, many of them still alive, who’d actually lived through that. (Many of those veterans had a hard time with Saving Private Ryan, to the point where the Department Of Veterans Affairs set up a hotline for anyone disturbed by the experience of watching the movie.) Spielberg’s father had fought in World War II, and Spielberg wanted Saving Private Ryan to work as some kind of tribute. But there’s also some clear baby-boomer soul-searching going on there—a generation of middle-aged men thinking about the sacrifices their families had made, wondering if they could’ve put themselves through the same things.
It’s only after that opening sequence that Saving Private Ryan really becomes a movie in the traditional sense—something that pushes a lot of the same entertainment buttons as Armageddon. Once the beach landing is done, we actually get to meet the people we’ll watch for the rest of the film, and most of them are classic war-movie types: the hard-nosed sergeant, the tough-talking New Yorker, the Bible-quoting Southerner, the wormy book-learning type. We learn the mission, the conflicts, the parameters. But even as it turns into a conventional film, the shadow of that opening gauntlet hangs over everything.
Spielberg brought in a whole lot of promising young actors to fill out those parts, as well as the rest of the movie. I’ve seen some reports about how Spielberg was annoyed that Matt Damon became hugely famous just before Saving Private Ryan came out; he wanted the actor to be a relative unknown so that moviegoers wouldn’t think Ryan was someone special. And Damon’s appearance does take you out of the movie a bit. When I saw the movie in the theater, I remember someone wolf-whistling when he showed up on screen. But to watch Private Ryan now is to get that feeling again and again, being jarred by familiar faces in this bloody world: Paul Giamatti barking out salty cynicism, Nathan Fillion getting almost buffoonishly upset, a one-armed Bryan Cranston staring at bereavement letters, Vin Diesel bleeding to death in the middle of a muddy street.
The casting decisions all work beautifully. Jeremy Davies, fresh off of Spanking The Monkey and losing the starring Titanic role to Leonardo DiCaprio, is beautifully detestable as the cowardly Upham, his whole arc all the more unbearable because of how many of us might fear that we’d act just like him in those situations. Adam Goldberg loses a fight even more devastating than the one he’d lost in Dazed And Confused. Giovanni Ribisi comes off as a sad and tender kid. Tom Sizemore, struggling through heroin withdrawal during the shoot, brings just the right level of pugnacious intensity. Ed Burns, acting in a movie that he didn’t personally direct for the first time, is the least interesting of them, but even he has a presence. (It’s wild, in retrospect, that Burns, an indie-film darling who looked like a Calvin Klein model, never quite put the pieces together. But then I guess Damon and Affleck were right there, just waiting to steal his thunder.)
At the center, there’s Tom Hanks, making use of his America’s-dad persona and bringing enough warmth and gravity to center all the carnage. In Private Ryan, Hanks has the paternalistic thing, and you get that he cares very much about the young men in his command. But the Captain Miller character also had to send dozens of those young men to their deaths, and he knows he’s not done yet. It hangs heavy on him. Miller won’t tell his men personal details because he knows he might kill them. When he has to cry, he hides from everyone else. Every time Hanks delivers a big speech in Private Ryan—and he’s got a few of them—he underplays it. Spielberg does the same thing. During the big, emotional conversational showdown between Hanks and Damon, where Private Ryan announces that he isn’t going to leave his post, Spielberg doesn’t even use that swelling John Williams score. He lets the silences linger.
There are mawkish, schmaltzy things about Saving Private Ryan. The opening and closing bits, with the elderly Ryan at Miller’s grave, overplay the pathos. Spielberg can’t quite bring himself to make a fully anti-war war movie, even after consciously stripping away all the glamor from the genre. He just has to get that last little bit of valorizing in. I have weird feelings about the whole plotline of Upham insisting on letting the one German soldier go, only to execute him later; it feels uncomfortably close to an endorsement of war crimes. And maybe it’s dishonest to end a film this jarring and intense with what amounts to an action-movie set piece. But it helps that it’s a really good action-movie set piece.
The tension before that final battle is amazing. My stomach knots up just thinking about it. Parts of the scene are almost as brutal as anything in the Normandy landing. But parts of it are thrilling and fun, too: Sizemore’s Sergeant Horvath and a German soldier throwing their helmets at each other, an injured Miller uselessly firing his pistol at an oncoming tank. The craft is just impeccable. The aesthetic choices that Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski made—washed-out colors, shaky handheld cameras, shots that are long but not showily long—would cast a huge shadow over decades of Hollywood action filmmaking. It’s tough to imagine how a Paul Greengrass movie might look, for instance, without the precedent of Saving Private Ryan. But nobody’s ever deployed that style with the clean, coherent mastery of Spielberg.
As a cultural phenomenon, Saving Private Ryan is a curious beast. On the one hand, it’s a terrible ordeal to put yourself through, which weirdly added to its appeal. People went to see the movie as a way of honoring older generations and doing penance for not having to go through the same things. (I think something similar happened with The Passion Of The Christ a few years later.) But at the same time, Private Ryan is also a fantastic piece of filmmaking, a grand showcase for stars both in front of and behind the camera. Against its own better judgement, it’s even entertaining. When Shakespeare In Love beat out Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar, it was a jarring and suspicious upset. That’s not because Shakespeare In Love is a bad movie (it’s not), but because the Oscars seem to exist to honor movies like Saving Private Ryan.
By and large, the big hits of 1998, even the really good ones, are loud and bright and puerile and dumb. There’s a whole lot of schticky mugging in Armageddon and There’s Something About Mary and The Waterboy and Doctor Doolittle and Rush Hour and Godzilla and Patch Adams, all of which were top-10 movies at the year-end box office. Saving Private Ryan is as loud and grabby as any of those movies, but it’s also raw and serious and masterful. In a time when big Hollywood movies were getting increasingly silly, Saving Private Ryan was the exception and also the victor.
After Saving Private Ryan, you couldn’t really talk about the two Hollywoods anymore. There was one Hollywood, and it was marching in a specific direction. Ben Affleck got on board, blasting off for that asteroid like so many of the other promising young actors of his generation. Hanks, bless him, tried to do something else. And at least in 1998, that something else worked.
The contender: The Farrelly Brothers’ There’s Something About Mary, the No. 3 hit at the 1998 box office, came out in the same month as Saving Private Ryan and Armageddon, and it became enough of a word-of-mouth smash to compete with both of them. Today, it’s impossible to imagine a mid-budget gross-out comedy having anything like that level of impact. But There’s Something About Mary was undeniable. The story is thin, and plenty of the jokes are the kind of down-punching shit that wouldn’t fly today, but it’s still full of expert body-horror slapstick set pieces.
In 1998 movie theaters, people were howling at that thing, laughing so hard that they’d go back and see it a second time just so that they could hear the jokes that they’d been laughing too hard to hear the first time. Last week, I watched it again—by myself, late at night, for probably the first time in 20 years—and I was howling again. (I also made my 8-year-old watch the balls-in-the-zipper scene the next morning. I have regrets.)
Next time: America’s moviegoers leave behind Earth wars and return to Star Wars, as George Lucas makes his big comeback with the utterly baffling Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
345 Comments
Truly one of the greatest films of the 90s and of all time. The Normandy sequence alone is one of the most gripping things I’ve ever watched.
It wasn’t just the visceral detail on the screen, it was the sound too. Not just the volume, but the surround-speaker positioning. Bullets zipped from front-right to rear-left. If the camera panned toward a sound, the audio panned too. The entire sequence is existentially horrifying; it’s also a masterpiece of cinema.
I’ve only seen this at home and even without a good speaker system the sound design is noticeable and intense.
I was visiting a friend who lived in LA at the time and we saw it at Mann’s Chinese theater and I swear you could hear bullets whizzing past your ear and between you and the person in the next seat. I flinched involuntarily every time a bullet went past or slapped into the ground. After the movie there was this old man, in military uniform, hunched over in the aisle, overwhelmed. People were gathered around him consoling him.
Good surround sound effects are such a nice detail. It’s it’s own craft. Do movie makers even care much about this anymore? Remeber when all the movies would feature the THX demos and the like before movies? I’m not sure that they still do (or did just before the dark times of this WORST YEAR EVER!). Poeple don’t really put home theater systems into their houses anymore. It’s all soundbars just below the flat screen.
I’m trying to remember if I’d ever seen the “now you’re deaf/ears are ringing” thing during a battle scene before this movie.
I remeber selling home theater systems back in the day and this was the best audio demo you could home for. Unfortuntely there was no way to use this scene to get people excited about bringing the magic of surround sound into your home.
Sure, but…and after that? 2+ hours of a pretty by-the-numbers war film, in my opinion anyway.
I have that issue with “Private Ryan” and anti-war movies in general. And it may be a paradox. The opening scene was presented as an unbearable realistic depiction of a war scene. But people loved it. It keeps being rewatched on purpose. Videogames rushed to emulate it. In a way it was judged awesome to behold. Pleasant. Wouldn’t a successfully realistic anti-war scene be a thing that is genuinely unpleasant, something that people would avoid watching again ? Such genuinely brutal scenes aren’t rare in cinema.So, an issue with what comes down to, still, artistic aestheticization. With a not-too-honest layer of how tough it is to watch.Counter-arguments being : The reaction of veterans (but is it a measure of the scene’s realism or can it be achieved with indirect evocations anyways). Or the unavoidable difference of watching it from a safe place (but we also watch rape scenes from a safe place and they can still be unpleasant enough to not be a sought and re-sought experience). And the ambiguity of art in general – a beautifully true and gut-wrenching song is still a beautiful song.Still, the collective reactions to that scene give me the impression that it missed its point, that it failed at eliciting the wanted emotion instead of the wanted description of emotion (“omg this was unbearable, I can’t wait to see it again”).
Maybe I’m an outlier, then, because every time I think about popping in my “Saving Private Ryan” DVD for a re-watch, I change my mind half the time because of the D-Day sequence. It is utterly brutal.
To this day, I have still only seen that movie one time: when it was released in theaters. I have often considered rewatching it, and every time I do, memory of that opening sequence hits me, and I’m like, mmm, maybe not.
Yeah, I’m trying to think now if I’ve ever actually gone back and watched it a second time, and I honestly can’t remember. I think I’ve probably caught the last half again here and there, but I don’t remember sitting down again and watching the opening, because it was so perfectly horrifying the first time. (Same for Schindler’s List, now that I think about it.) It’s so well-done that it can’t possibly be a “hey, I’ll pop this in and watch it again” movie.
That is the only part that I do watch; the rest of the film is a letdown for me. Many great scenes that never added up to a whole for me. I was glad when Shakespeare in Love won, and I would much rather see that one again.
For me it’s the thought of sitting through the scene where Giovanni Ribisi dies screaming and burbling for his mother that always points me in another direction. And for whatever reason, even after roughly 2 hours 20 minutes of gruesome war violence, the tank sabotage scenes in the final sequence with multiple dudes going splat at the same time Upham is at his most cowardly makes my skin crawl – NOPE. This movie is an astonishing achievement and a fucking slog at the same time. Until The Pacific came out it was the most viscerally and upsettingly violent depiction of war I’d ever seen (and it might still be, at least The Pacific has room to breathe). I wouldn’t at all put it in the same category of re-watchable action as the Bay and Wahlberg style war-schlock that’s come out recently.
Whoa. I can’t imagine wanting to see that part again. I saw SPR in the theatre one time, and it was such a viscerally unpleasant experience I will never watch it again.
I would also contend that Saving Private Ryan is not an anti-war movie. Its stance is more like: this is war. This is the ugly mess that it is. But to be against this means letting the Nazis take over.
This is it.
Being anti-war doesn’t mean the nazis get to take over again, it means we have to try as hard as we possibly can to defeat them culturally before they can generate support. Now we hopefully don’t need to send 18 year old kids to their death, because a lot of those kids are confident enough to put themselves out there publicly and mock nazis on YouTube and Twitter and anywhere else they can potentially be seen by thousands or millions of people.
There is a strong case here for Truffaut’s comment “For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” That said, I thing that Spielberg did the best job anyone has ever done at making an anti-war film, and the opening of SPR really sets the stage for that.
Nah, I’ll take Paths of Glory as an anti-war film any day over Spielberg’s overrated thing.
Yeah. I often think of Truffaut’s quote. I still think it’s an exaggeration. At least, it raises an important question that isn’t solved for me. Is “the good the bad and the ugly” an anti-war film ? Is “paths of glory” an anti-war film ? I’m certain there are some that remove any beauty or exhilaration from their artful war scenes. Yet again, was beauty and exhilaration truly absent of the complex and perverse realities of war ? But also, there’s good old subjectivity. And this comments section show that a same movie, a same sequence, can have very different impacts on different people, from the “cool, I hope it will be featured in Medal of Duty 5″ to “irk, okay done, not watching this ever again”.There is no universal emotional language. Which probably makes the question a bit moot.
There’s a logic error in Truffaut’s thesis, because a war movie must – like any other film that hopes to succeed – tell a compelling story with characters you get invested in. A true anti-war film where a bunch of people you don’t like are killed and nothing accomplished wouldn’t have much of a chance of being made. I’ll concede that war movies are almost inherently going to be part action film, which likewise needs to be done well. And people like action.
Have you seen A Midnight Clear? People get killed, but I’d say it’s the best anti-war film out there.
Love that movie. One of the best low budget war films out there. Did you know the director, Keith Gordon played the nerdy guy in Christine and Rodney Dangerfield’s son in Back to School? He also made one of the best Kurt Vonnegut film adaptions “Mother Night”.
i’d argue for ‘a bridge too far.’ i think its because that movie wasn’t trying to be an anti-war movie, but it just kind of creeps in on its own due to the historical end of that operation. so you get all these heroic moments, triumphs of american and english fighting but at the end of the movie, they lose. and they lose because of dumb bureaucracy and the ego’s of their leaders, who basically don’t really even care.
Don’t you fucking dare forget General Sosabowski.“Faith? I will tell you how much faith I have. I am thinking of asking for a letter from you stating I was ordered to go on this mission in case my men are massacred.”“I see…do you really wish such a letter?”“No. In the case of a massacre, what difference would it make?”
I would counter that “Paths of Glory”, “All Quiet on the Western Front”, and “Full Metal Jacket” are much more anti-war than SPR.
It’s bizarre to think that Saving Private Ryan is an anti-war film. Certainly Spielberg isn’t making anti-war film about WWII, the war his Father served in. And as people above said, the beginning, while pretty gory, was thrilling enough to be patched out in video games almost immediately. Spielberg’s set pieces and excitement just make things too visually exciting and thrilling to make war seem “bad”. Sure, it IS bad, but Saving Private Ryan makes it seem like it’s a gauntlet of thrilling sniper battles, glorious, worthwhile deaths and clearly defined action. I guess what I’m saying is that Saving Private Ryan is a great movie: it makes what is onscreen look clear, exciting, and redemptive.
Unless you go the Andy Warhol route of making a 10 hour anti-art movie, there really isn’t a way to make a movie that shows whatever it shows in a truly negative way. Cinema is just too innately glamorous and clarifying.
Come and See is a true anti-war film. I wouldn’t want to be within a thousand miles of a war after seeing that.
“Spielberg did the best job anyone has ever done at making an anti-war film”Wow, that’s a strong hyperbole in a world with The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Gallipoli, Das Boot, Waltz With Bashir, Apocalypse Now, etc(not to mention non-battle anti-war films like Spielberg’s own Schindler’s List)
This was genuinely brutal and many people avoid watching it:
I’ve had to reverse-google that image, because I know absolutely nothing of that film (nothing to do with Al Jolson I assume ?).
Only the title
It’s a remake of the Al Jolson film. Neil Diamond is the Jolson character – a Jewish cantor who wants to be a popular singer instead.
I agree. The movie was full of horrific scenes that were shot as spectacle. The counter sniper shot is another great example. The only truly horrifying scene, in my opinion, that really stuck with me was Adam Goldberg’s piercing. Clearly, Spielberg was making a movie celebrating soldiers, using the carnage and horror as a way to display their sacrifice and trauma, but still honoring them.If he had wanted to make an anti-war film that really disturbed people, he could. I’ve only ever been able to watch Schindler’s list once.
The scene where the Americans were gunning down unarmed, surrendered Germans was pretty contoversial at the time. One scene that struck me wasn’t even violent, it was when the squad was rudely sorting through the dog tags of the dead looking for a Ryan. I think one possible reason for the schmaltzy framing was to counterbalance those scenes. I think it a stretch to say Spielberg was making an antiwar movie, or even a realistic one, but I think in places he effectively changes some set ideas of how war movies should be.
The framing scenes frustrate me SO MUCH because they’re one of those overly schmaltzy and emotionally obvious Spielberg moments where less really could have been more. If they had played those scenes with no dialogue at all, just gestures and cutting between the expressions of the actors it could have been much more powerful and at the same time stood in for every single soldier who fought and survived, not just this one particular soldier.
I think that dog tag scene was pretty realistic. I don’t mean that I think it specifically happened, but that, having been in the military, I can see people doing this. There’s a callousness that builds into you when you are in the military that would likely only get harder in war. So, that is definitely something that could have happened.
Not “anti-war” in the technical sense, but he came pretty close with Munich in my opinion. There’s an angry movie that heavily criticizes two countries on opposite sides of a conflict (with some anti-USA sentiments thrown in for good measure).
I closed my eyes during that scen I had no interest in seeing Goldberg’s Prince Albert
Have you seen The Thin Red Line? Asking for a friend…
I have, I didn’t like it. I was not familiar with Terrence Malick’s work when I saw it, so it was not at all what I was expecting. Any message it may have contained was lost on me, as I found it incredibly boring.
I’d say The Thin Red Line gets closer to anti-war than SPR, in part because of its confusing, sometimes seemingly pointless, approach to character and narrative. Somebody above said to be able to follow through on Truffaut’s point, you’d need to make a movie about characters you can’t get invested in who all get killed, and TTR comes close to that, which is one of its points, I think.But even it falls victim to the aestheticizing problem – film, even down and dirty, ugly film – makes things look good. It valourizes what it depicts, even as it attempts to show it in a bad light.I think a good anti-war film might have to eschew shots of war, maybe show the after-effects much more clearly, or something. I think Coming Home is a good example – there are no shots of war in the film, but it focuses, rather, on war’s horrible consequences (and also, the horror of how the US Gov’t turns its back on its vets). It’s a lot more effectively anti-war than its competitor that year The Deer Hunter, which always seemed, to me, to revel in its violence.
Yes. Its was not in the same league as SPR. A bit of a disappointment. Slow languorous, detached. Never saw a desire to rewatch it.
Both of your points are very good. Adam Goldberg’s death gets to me way worse than anything in the D-Day sequence. That and Schindler’s List highlight that yes, Speilberg can do the thing where you just don’t want to bare witness to what you’re seeing. So people’s reaction to the beach, the almost macabre desire to revisit it again and again, is somewhat puzzling. Perhaps Steven gives it a sense of valor that Schindler’s List and the knife scene don’t have.
The biggest problem with the the D-Day sequence (and don’t get me wrong, it’s still a masterful sequence) is that Spielberg includes too many ‘clever’ moments that would’ve been at home in his other movies but feel out of place here and undercut the relentlessness. Breihan mentioned the soldier who gets hit in the helmet and stares in wonder at it only to get shot in the head, but then you also have bits like the radio operator that Hanks relays messages to once, twice, and on the third time finds he’s dead. I know these moments are supposed to reflect the randomness of war, but they feel almost comically random instead of reflecting the true brutality of that randomness (though the radio operator’s face being blown apart is plenty brutal). Then you throw in things like Chekhov’s flamethrower and the inevitable slow-motion moment to tell us all how serious this is, and in a way Spielberg lets us off the hook. Perhaps he felt the sequence needed those moments or else it would be too much for the viewer, but if he wants us to feel the real horror of war then he should have forced viewers to remain uncomfortable the whole time. You can’t have it both ways.
Then you throw in things like Chekhov’s flamethrower
Chekhov’s Flamethrower? Can you elaborate on that. Because the only flamethrower scene I recall is near the end of the Dday landing when they burn up the German pill box, and the soldier on the gorund screams “Don’t shoot. Let ‘em burn.” And that’s the only flamethrower use we see. It’s shown and used in the 1st act. Is there something I’m missing?
There’s one that earlier explodes on the back of the soldier wearing it up the beach, spraying Hanks’ face with blood droplets. I know when I first saw guys running around with those in the middle of a firefight, I thought “I would NOT want to be wearing a tank of fuel on my back in the middle of all that.”Then boom. I expect that’s what he’s referencing.
Mea culpa time. Whenever a movie shows a flamethrower with one of those giant fuel tank backpacks, is seems there’s inevitably a moment showing it blow up while on a guy’s back. I thought that happened in Private Ryan too, with two separate shots – one establishing the flamethrower soldier and then returning to him in the second shot for the explosion. Looking back on it now shows me that it all happens in one moment. Misremembrance on my part.Here is the moment I was referring to (around the 5:00 mark if the link doesn’t go there directly):
I think its the part with the flamethrower guy on the beach getting hit and going up in flames
I expect a lot of people’s reaction was like mine; just a sort of awe and horror over what it must have been like to actually be there. There are plenty of movies with scenes where the point is to mesmerize the viewer as a means of pulling them emotionally into the film. I put SPR’s Normandy scene into that category. I don’t think there’s any artistic aethesticization (as you put it) going on here. People watch the scene again not because it’s pleasant, but because it’s so well done that it never loses that power even after multiple rewatches. It takes you to a place emotionally that has been achieved by very few films.
It also has the effect of leaving you feeling disoriented the rest of the film (which is sounds like is exactly what Spielberg was going for). So in addition to putting you in the center of the invasion experience, as Breihan notes, it also leaves you as close as a film can get to how it must have felt to be a soldier trying to move on and survive post-D-Day. They walk through the countryside cracking jokes and talking shit, but in their quieter moments let their guards down (or sneak away to break down for a minute). Just sitting in the theater, I didn’t feel normal again for the rest of the film even when nothing in particular was happening. My wife won’t re-watch it because she found it so unsettling.
The Omaha Beach scene at least gave us this South Park bit:
Whats interesting is how SPR has been imitated or its style copied in subsequent war movies worldwide. The desaturated color palate, overuse of tracers, gore film aesthetics, sped up camera, heavy handheld use, rapid cutting. It has become the standard for the 21st Century. Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima films owe a huge stylistic debt to SPR. The cemetery framing device has been imitated internationally with Yamato (Japan) and Taegukgi (Korea). SPR led to a revival of war films in Korea.in a big way.
(Sorry for the lateness.) I remember just staring up at the screen with a handful of popcorn. I didn’t even eat any popcorn during that scene (and I love my popcorn.) I mean, I cried, too, but mostly I was just in awe. And I mean that in the old sense of the word, the fearful fascination sense.
“It was Francois Truffaut who said that it’s not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, end up making combat look like fun. If Truffaut had lived to see Platoon, the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion. Here is a movie that regards combat from ground level, from the infantryman’s point of view, and it does not make war look like fun.”— Roger EbertI would argue that is still an on-point cinematic observation almost 35 years later. Point-of-view issues aside, the only scene in which Stone’s film momentarily gives in to adrenaline rah-rah-ing is when Sheen’s character decides to-hell-with-foxholes in the climactic battle. The best war movie of all time, Apocalypse Now, has sequences that very deliberately mix the viscerally exciting with the viscerally horrifying, so that the (civilian) viewer’s response is meant to be pure WTF disorientation. (That is not the same thing, as Pasolini and many other filmmakers learned, as simply numbing .)
I would go further that any worthwhile war movie should inspire— mixed emotions. If a war film is either uniformly grim or all Green Berets gung-ho, then it’s not doing its ideal job, i.e, inspiring you to meditate on the real-life reasons why men just keep going to war in the first place.
I’d agree with Ebert, except as harrowing as Platoon was, it still depicted Sheen as going in a boy and coming out a man. And there’s something about that narrative that still appeals to a lot of young men in regard to war.
The rite-of-passage thing is a good point. It undoubtedly says something about America/American cinema that the only other place where the young male rite of passage is so important is– teen and collegiate sex comedies.
There’s even the argument that SPR (or at least the whole WWII nostalgia trend in the 1990s and early 2000s that it was a part of) led to the Iraq war because it made war seem important and noble again after so many Vietnam War movies that focused on how pointless it was.
Nah. W had a hard on for Saddam after he put a bounty on daddy’s head, and Dick Cheney went full retard after 9/11, so Iraq War 2: Electric Boogaloo was always going to happen one way or another.
This is a weird statement after the VA had to setup up warnings for veteran’s who saw the movie and that in the TNT broadcasts they often eliminate most of the worst of the initial scene. Noone likes that scenes, it doesn’t even have the thrill of a horror movie, it just sits there.When you talk about emulation, that is an interesting point. I think the genious on display causes a seperate reaction from what is going on on screen, and if anything, it has encouraged lesser creators to try (and fail) to get to the same place. Its also clearly not anti-war but honoring the sacrifices of the fallen in a necessary conflict. So you were mostly incorrect, but I think you hit on something about how the power of the movie created these ripples in creatives, who could never achieve the same level of reality, and so inspired depthless but entertaining imitators.
Noone likes that scenes, You’re wrong about that. Check the views on youtube. And the reviews and comments on WW2 shooters praised because “it’s awesome like you’re in that scene of private ryan”.
Adrenaline and excitement are as much a part of war as the horror, I think. I don’t think it’s contradictory to present both aspects; people will find themselves drawn to certain parts of the text more than others depending on their mood and personality. There’s a passage in George R.R. Martin’s The Sworn Sword that I think captures this well:“A great battle is a terrible thing,” the old knight said “but in the midst of blood and carnage, there is sometimes also beauty, beauty that could break your heart. I will never forget the way the sun looked when it set upon the Redgrass Field . . . ten thousand men had died, and the air was thick with moans and lamentations, but above us the sky turned gold and red and orange, so beautiful it made me weep to know that my sons would never see it.”I guess it’s also the case that when you’re making a film about World War II, you can’t really argue that it wasn’t a war that the Allies needed to fight, given the stakes.
Well, you’re arguing for the interpretation of the masses as getting the actual point, and I think anything violent ultimately spawns people who glorify that violence, whether the original art did or not. Because we’re incredibly fucked up as a society. I think, though, that this article itself illustrates an important difference between something like Saving Private Ryan and something like Armageddon, which presented death and destruction on and even grander scale, but clearly was doing so for a different reason and in a different light. My parents saw Saving Private Ryan together and it wasn’t until they got home in my dad’s car that they remembered they’d actually driven separately to the theater after work. They were so shaken by it they had forgotten my mom’s car at the theater parking lot. I don’t think that kind of thing happened to a lot of people who saw Armageddon.
Of course videogames emulated it. Nerds like systems and patterns, dislike creativity and so will always seek to operate within an established system rather than create something new, referencing extant things rather creating new ones. That’s their entire subculture – cosplay, fanart, memetics. Nerds can’t generate their own cultural capital. Rather than make their own that they know their fellow nerds can’t interpret, they instead hold up signs made by someone else.
Sam Fuller, filmmaker, survivor of Omaha Beach said in his autobiography The Third Face, “there’s no way you can portray war realistically, not in a movie or a book.” In order to convey “the idea of real combat” to movie audiences, he says, “you’d have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen. The casualties in the theater would be bad for business. Such reaching for reality in the name of art is against the law.”
Armageddon is a movie I absolutely hated as a teenager when it came out and really didn’t enjoy.Seeing it again as an adult, I fucking loved it. It’s so insanely over the top, macho and weirdly camp that it’s an absolute blast to watch.
Agreed. The movie is dumb fun. It is in the same camp as Independence Day. It is silly and loud and doesn’t care. Just turn your brain off and enjoy the ride.
I hated it then and now. But my wife loves it, so I sometimes have to sit through part of it.It’s the scene with Buscemi wildly firing the machine gun mounted on the top of the rover that turned it from not good to just awful. It’s as if, after they were almost done shooting the movie, Mikey Bay realized that with all the explosions and death, he hadn’t shown any gunfire yet, so decided to jam it in there.
It’s one where the sooner you say “fuck it” and just roll with it, the more you’ll enjoy it. If you get hung up on Bruce Willis firing a shotgun on an active offshore drill rig (which IRL would almost certainly go full Macondo), then it’s not going to be the movie for you.
Deep Impact is, by far, the better film.
Absolutely, but Armageddon is a lot more fun.
(Obviously, the Deep Impact wave scene is by leaps and bounds the best disaster scene in either movie)
Deep Impact is definitely the more scientifically accurate of the two asteroid/comet films of 1998, but it’s nowhere near as watchable as Armageddon.
Aerosmith really makes the whole thing
And the weirdest part is that it somehow got into the Criterion Collection.
the criterion collection is funny because i think bay just asked if armageddon and the rock could be in it and they were like ‘yeah, sure’. it has this rep as being ‘the canon’ but, like, lena dunham and kevin smith are both in it.
they just don’t make movies like that anymore. nowadays, the only way to get a big budget to blow shit up is to put someone in a cape and tights. i miss summer blockbusters.
It’s stupid as all hell, loud and flashy with such little substance, and I absolutely love it. I re-watch it every time it comes up.
Look let’s just admit this right now. The best part of Armageddon is the Ben Affleck commentary track.
Ha! Don’t you just love that AJ has set up his own oil company, just a day after they left the Rig?
I’ve always loved that. Both his pathetically small sign which has his name and title, but also that his character has the most 90s name ever – AJ Frost
Armageddon is maybe the only time I ever fell asleep in the theater. It took the wrong lessons from ID4, which had really good character work and moments of surprising specificity. Armageddon just blew shit up.
Yes its not a great movie, but its extremely fun to watch. Its one of those big, dumb blockbusters thats hard to turn off when you are flipping channels on the TV
I remember Ben Affleck mentioning in the commentary for Armageddon that he pointed out to Michael Bay that it’d be easier to train astronauts to use the drilling equipment than it’d be to train oil riggers to be astronauts and Bay told him to “Shut the fuck up.”.Also it’s worth mentioning that Armageddon and Deep Impact came out the same summer, the former was made by a subsidiary of Disney, and the latter was produced by Dreamworks.
Yet of all the other ’98 blockbuster films – Deep Impact, SPR, what have you – Armageddon was most focused on throwing in the cheap shot at Godzilla.
To be fair, Toho also made jabs at Godzilla (1998) in Godzilla: Final Wars.
Yeah, but Toho is at least justified in their grievance; “We gave Americans a shot with our property, and THIS is what they came up with?”Armageddon is not a better film than Godzilla ’98.
Oh I’m not defending it, they’re both terrible.
Wasn’t that part of the plot? They were trying to train the astronauts, and Bruce Willis’ character was all, “they can’t do this! Only real wildcatters can do this!” or some bullshit?
I’d have to guess that they threw that line in for this very reason.
Because you can’t circlejerk around good American blue collar men, who wants to cheer for the science bitches?
Haha, science bitch.
Or “Yeah Science! Bitch!”
Ah yes the greatest contribution to society that film ever achieved. The snarkiest and most amusing commentary known to man. Its great.
As is de rigour with just about every Spielberg film, if he were to excise the last ten minutes, it’d be perfect. But no… He has to get the schmaltz in.There are some phenomenal scenes in this film. The one I remember most clearly is the one Ribisi delivers, where he admits that he pretended to be sleeping when his mom came into his room because he just didn’t want to deal with her. We all have been there, haven’t we? Such a heartbreaking scene.But… The best WWII movie that year was not this. It was The Thin Red Line.
It’s not just the last ten minutes that should have been cut — the opening is part of the same piece. The framing is not only cheap syrup, it’s forgettable. I think the bit in this piece about Spielberg threatening to block late arrivals is telling — he may not have been worried about people missing the D Day landing, he may well have been thinking word would leak about how skippable the actual opening was.It’s funny how many people remember Ryan starting in the landing craft and ending with Miller dying, because that is the section that matters and the present day scenes are there because Spielberg calculated that he needed the bolted on stuff to get it accepted by “Greatest Generation” fetishists.I’m reminded of the uproar over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 15 years earlier. Maya Lin’s original design was perfect and it has to this day the support of the large majority of Vietnam Veterans. But a minority of right wingers complained that it was unpatriotic, and started screaming to jam a flag and statue at the vertex of the V. Eventually a flag and statue were placed at the edge of the memorial, where they stand to this day, completely unmemorable, as a sign of how kitsch seeps in to appease cheap politics.
I always thought the final scene would have been vastly improved if the old guy had been there alone. Or at least have one of the little kids whining that they were bored.
You do get the bit where his son is snapping photos as they walk through the cemetery, and the wife scolds him to knock it off. To the son it was just a family trip to France.
If they made the movie today all the grandkids would be playing on their phone or taking posed Instagram photos in the cemetery, #Normandy.
You should write reviews. This was an amazing comment.
I watched Thin Red Line a bit after Private Ryan and didn’t care for it at all. I hadn’t seen anything by Malick up to that point. Years later, after I’d seen Tree of Life and his 70s films, I decided to revisit it. It just confirmed my opinion that his complete disinterest in making a war movie (rather than a nature documentary) made him the wrong director for it. A Hidden Life is his good movie about that conflict.
I noped out of TRL at about the point where Woody Harrelson does some of the worst acting of his career pretending a grenade blew his keister off.
Yeah, everybody knows white guys don’t have keisters.
It is the reason why they can’t jump. Woody should know this.
That was the title of the never made sequel to White Men Can’t Jump.
I thought it was the working draft.
“Hey, Snipes might be interested in attaching himself to this if we don’t mention white keisters in the title!”
One of the only movies I’ve ever fallen asleep in the theater during.
Yeah I’ve seen this once, and never again, partly because the war scenes are so viscerally upsetting, but mostly because the maudlin opening and closing ruin what is an otherwise gripping movie. This is the first time Spielberg’s inability to end his movies rears its head. After this it’s all happy endings, oedipal talking machines, miraculous surviving sons, convenient replacement babies, or just movies that go on too long past the end point.
After that speech, when Ribisi is gut shot. shivering, while his friends try in vain to stop the bleeding, he cries out for his mother and if fucking wrecks me every time.
The section at the beginning with old Matt Damon should have gone at the end, and the part at the end should have ended up on the cutting room floor. I know there’s a takeout in that you’re supposed to think the old guy is Tom Hanks, but it didn’t really matter in the end. The old man scene is ruined by the dialogue. The part where he falls down in front of the graves is enough to communicate what’s going on, and I think it’s more intense.
I will always give The Thin Red Line a grade over Saving Private Ryan. The former seemed more spiritual. The latter was just gritty.
I felt The Thin Red Line was an extremely dull, pretentious film. And it has like eight consecutive endings. To date it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen other theatergoers walk out of before it was over, and that includes SPR with its Normandy sequence.
As war movies go Ryan is no Paths of Glory, but it’s a good movie. Good call comparing the cultural self-flagellation to Passion of the Christ. Really disliked the Upham arc. I guess if anyone has some degree of cultural literacy they must be pompous cowards. Vin Diesel could have been the Gen-X Lee Marvin. But I digress.
Upham seemed like Spielberg was doing his version of the NY Times diner safari, winking to a bunch of elites that they are in the know that cultured weaklings are stealing the valor of the real heroes. Yes sir, they are the savvy ones. Better repeat it a few more times to make sure everyone knows they get it.
He wasn’t pompous (his treatment was more an indictment of the rest of the squad), and probably not really a coward. The others had all been through the fire repeatedly; this was Upham’s first face-to-face experience with combat. He wants to let the German go after his first firefight because that’s what the rules dictate. He also learns the hard way that an enemy soldier is one more asset they can later use against you. So I disagree with Beihan that it borderline glorifies war crimes. Upham felt betrayed (even if he had no right to under the circumstances), and then resentful when the German tried to use their previous encounter to soften him up. It also made the rest of the captives, who majorly outnumbered him, aware that he would shoot them without hesitation. Like much of the rest of the movie, illegal killings are depicted as another horrible element of war. It also makes the audience complicit, because I know my first reaction was “good.”
There are a lot of layers to his arc, and you can look at it from different angles as well. as far as the war crime angle, he was right to argue that they couldn’t kill the guy initially and there is no doubt, legally speaking, that it was a war crime for him to kill him at the end. But that’s also not an act that anyone’s really going to criticize given the context you mention above. Clearly that guy’s gotta pay for not following the instructions they gave him when they let him go the first time, and then reminding him of it was the last straw. It’s wrong, but you’re not going to blame Uphman for it. At the same time though, what was the German guy going to do? Maybe he did walk towards the American lines, got lost and ended up meeting german forces instead. more likely, he was scared of becoming a POW, walked until he was out of sight and doubled back towards German lines. So he meets up with the German Army, and it’s not like he can just say “hey guys, I gotta sit the rest of the war out becuase I made a deal with this American guy Upham”. There’s no right or wrong here, just a dead guy who was going to be dead one way or another becuase he’s in a fucking war. But on a personal level, I always kinda felt that Upham killed that guy not becuase he betrayed the original agreement, but becuase when he said his name Upham realized that the German guy knew he was the guy the machine gunners were calling for, and that he had been cowardly during the battle. I don’t think the german guy knew his name from the earlier scene, I’d have to re-watch it to see if they said his name while they were arguing or not. And I’m not even sure if that German guy was the guy who saw that Upham had been hiding. Maybe it’s just that the guy saying Upham reminded him of the guys screaming his name, waiting for the ammo. I just really come away from that feeling that Upham killed that guy in a moment of rage, which was ultimately coming from his own self loathing for freezing up in battle.
Paths of Glory and Gallipoli, I would put up there as what an anti-war movie should aspire to.
…which inspired my favourite porn movie parody title, Shaving Ryans Privates.
Pocahotass is pretty solid as well.
Saving Ryans Privates has always been a favorite of mine.
I prefer Schindler’s Fist.
I remember Howie Mandel making a similar joke, “Seeing Ryan’s Privates,” in a promo for his talk show and I instantly hated the show. It only lasted one season.
Fist Full of Dolores
My grandfather was at Normandy. I saw this movie in the theaters and called him up right after it was done to tell him not to go. It would have broken him. The horror of that opening half hour is just too much. I still haven’t seen it again, even though he’s been dead for 20 years now. Thinking of him as one of those guys is not something I ever need to do over again.
One big thing the opening of the film gets annoyingly wrong: they should have been stuck on that beach for hours. The Big Red One did it better. But, I defer to your grandfather.
I’m not sure Something About Mary wouldn’t be a hit today. It’s true a lot of it is still hilarious, and Knives Out shows there is still an audience for moderate budget non-spectacle movies. But the thinking at studios has definitely shifted a lot since then.
I think Mary missed its hypothetical comeback window in the late 2000s/early 2010s, when Apatow movies briefly resurrected the R-rated dude bro comedies. It would need to lose a couple set pieces in favor of 10 unbroken minutes of improv, but the schmaltz factor is present in both.
Ugh, that improv crack is dead on. Mary is gross but also just a ridiculously funny script and anchored by Diaz at her sweetest, for a movie with a lot of jizz it has very little fat.
The performances in that movie are just top-notch across the board. Diaz as mentioned, also Stiller at his most likably nebbish, W. Earl Brown who finds the comedy as a realistically disabled person without being mawkish or offensive, Chris Elliott at the peak of his banal grossness, and friggin’ Matt Dillon as a revelation of a comedic actor. I honestly think he should’ve been nominated for an Oscar for that role.
Apart from the dodgy American accent, Lee Evans is really good too. I kinda wonder why after Mousehunt and Mary, he never made a bigger breakthrough in US films.
Maybe he didn’t want to do the Hollywood thing?
“So one day, Mongo gets out of his cage…”
Mary’s an example of a comedy that barely has a plot being super-tightly written in a way most comedies today have thrown out in favor of not just improve but character reaction shots that I guess are meant to show you how crazy what just happened it (Hangover being the most egregious offender). If something’s funny, I don’t need the movie to tell me. Stiller doesn’t say a word and other than a bemused look barely registers Diaz using his spunk as hair gel.
I feel like TV comedy is much better than film comedy right now and maybe has been for a decade, a few outliers aside.Hell, Thor: Ragnarok is funnier than a lot of proper “comedies.”
It’s funny you mention comedies becoming just improv and reaction shots, because that’s how I feel about most of Stiller’s movies after Mary. Not so much the improv but reaction shots. Stiller does something stupid, cut to reaction shot of him looking flummoxed.
You could still make a Farrelly comedy a hit today. You’d have to cut down on the jizz, and maybe make a white person learn that racism is bad by driving a black person around, but it is doable.
Something About Mary is the only time I’ve ever been in a theater where people were literally falling out of their seats laughing. Most people don’t think about “punching down” when they’re watching a comedy.
I have weird feelings about the whole plotline of Upham insisting on
letting the one German soldier go, only to execute him later; it feels
uncomfortably close to an endorsement of war crimes.
No, it isn’t. It’s a statement that war is an ugly mess and decency has no part of it. It’s also a metaphor for having let Hitler go after the Beer Hall Putsch, when he should have been executed. Instead, they let the German go, he comes back and brutally murders the Jew in the group and kills the Captain. Finally Upham wakes up and you see him become a soldier. You can also see him as a stand-in for America – ignoring the bloodbath going on around him and stepping in after so much of the damage had been done.
The guy who kills Mellish is a different guy. As a statement that war is an ugly mess, Upham killing the other guy kind of works, but it certainly doesn’t work as any sort of redemption for Upham, or as an endorsement that the prisoner should have been killed to begin with, or that the execution was justified or deserved.
I don’t see it as a “redemption.” Just a recognition of what war really is. Didn’t help that the German reacted like he found his friend, and Upham saw through his bullshit finally and said you’re not talking your way out of this one.
I didn’t get that from the scene. My takeaway was that Upham killed the man that he had previous gone against the entire squad to show mercy to because he couldn’t stand that he didn’t have it in him to perform when it counted, and ‘Steamboat Willie’ was the walking, talking incarnation of that failure and weakness.
The soldier who kills Mellish isn’t actually the freed prisoner (who shoots Miller). They just look similar.
Hmm. It would have made more sense narratively. Also the fact that after killing Mellish, the German just ignored Upham whimpering on the stairs, because he knew him from before and wasn’t a threat.
Also the fact that after killing Mellish, the German just ignored Upham
whimpering on the stairs, because he knew him from before and wasn’t a
threat.Dude, you can just look it up on Imdb and wikipedia to see that its two different characters and actors.
Yeah that’s what America usually does in combat, saves the day. Fuck’s sake, grow up.
Hanks gives a hauntingly brilliant perfromance, but the cast is really a Murderer’s Row from top to bottom, especially Ed Burns and, of all people, Vin Diesel.
He tries very rarely nowadays, but Vin Diesel is actually a good actor – somewhat limited in range, but really charismatic and of course, skilled at using that gravel-in-a-cement-mixer voice.
He’s great in Boiler Room as well (as is Ribisi). Put him in a role where he doesn’t take his shirt off and he’ll deliver.
find me guilty, the movie he did with sidney lumet (!) also has a really good performance from ol’ vin.
He’s a fine actor, he’s just gotten really comfortable and complacent making hugh-budget action movies and probably getting paid out the ass to do it.
I’m honestly surprised he didn’t become a big voice actor star, I suppose there’s a lot less money in that.
Well, he is the voice of Groot, and wasn’t he also the voice of The Iron Giant? He made millions of dollars for saying the same three words with multiple inflections for one afternoon. If he’d done dozens of voice roles, Groot doesn’t stand out like it does. But I’m sure he could have done more voice work if he had looked for it.
Superman…
I am Groot.
people forget that at the time vin diesel himself was a bit of an indie darling coming off of his self-made short multi-facial. obviously spielberg knew how to use him, too.
You should cherish this because this kind of NYC accent is slowly dying. Wont be around in a few generations.
That role was specifically written for Diesel after Spielberg saw in him in one of his first movies.
Worth pointing out that the squad contained several directors: Hanks, Burns, Diesel, and Goldberg had all helmed movies by the time SPR came out.
Every time I watch Private Ryan, and also 25th Hour, I’m amazed that Barry Pepper never became a bigger star.
Also good in the True Grit remake.
Barry Pepper as Ned Pepper was indeed pretty good, even when compared to Robert Duvall.
Look, as classic as the Duke is in the original, I love the Coen’s version.“Are- are we trading again?”
Punishment for Battlefield Earth?
vin knows how to act, he just doesn’t really have to anymore
In a film full of grim episodes, the sequence of taking the machine-gun nest is incredibly hard to watch. Apart from the fact I really don’t understand why Jackson isn’t also in the rear sniping with his sniper rifle (to the military buffs, is there an actual tactical reason for this?) … watching Wade screaming for his mother while his shocked squad mates are so clueless without his medical help, they’re just wiping the blood away from the hole that’s pumping it out … unbearable.
Yeah, that scene confused me too. Especially when Burns’ character talks about being able to go around them without being detected. Couldn’t they go around and lob some grenades from behind or something instead of straight up charging into it?
I’d assume going around it meant they could avoid it completely to achieve their primary objective, and not a tactical benefit to going around. Like if it’s in the middle of a field between them and Ryan, they can just walk out of its way to not be seen and still get to Ryan, but there’s no approaching it from any direction that would be more tactically advantageous. Attacking it at all is certainly meant to be a confusing moment. It’s been a bit since I watched, but my recollection is that it was an unnecessary risk that Miller decides to do because he momentarily lets his personal feelings of disenfranchisement with their mission get the better of him- and the cost was Wade’s life.
I’m surprised this write-up didn’t mention that scene. Ribisi asking what color the blood is and knowing immediately that he’s already dead is horrifying. And the aftermath is just wrenching; Hanks was right, those Germans had already killed some other soldiers and it would have been a cop-out for them to ignore the nest. But his squad was also right that it was highly risky, and their anger and frustration unsurprisingly boils over. Hanks takes in out on Upham, making him dig graves with the German as punishment for doing the unpopular right thing.
That whole scene is a morality play where there are no correct answers.
Call in artillery or air support, for two
I went to see this with a friend of mine back when we were both out of high school. We were walking around afterwards processing our feelings when he told me “That is why I’d enlist if there was a war”. I can’t remember his exact reasoning; wether it was the theme of sacrifice, or the unequivocal threat of the Nazis, but I remember being annoyed that the spectacle of the film, despite the moral complexities, or perhaps because of them, functioned perfectly well as propaganda. It certainly added credibility to Truffaut’s claim that there’s no such thing as an anti-war film.
If you were a teenager in the South at the turn of the century, every dipshit guy at your high school would, at some point, compare themselves to Barry Pepper’s character. You knew he was good at heart, you see, because he knew his Bible chapter and verse…but he was also an extreme badass who could quickscope anybody. Adjusting their Carhartt jacket, drawling out some equivalent of “That’s who I’d be.”
No, you wouldn’t.
Dipshit.
Particularly if you were a teen in ’98 you’d be prime enlistment fodder after 9/11 with that in the back of your mind in the scenario you speak of.
Sone kid from my high school joined up and became a sniper and got blown up by an IED. He became a hometown hero and they named a shitty bridge after him. Everybody conveniently forgot that he used to bully my friend because he was schizophrenic, telling him to kill himself and mocking him for the terrible side effects of his mental illness and the medication to treat it.
but I like Carhartt jackets….
They’re the same type of people who seem damn near excited to shoot someone who breaks into their home. They only think about that one fleeting moment of heroism that only exists in movies, never about the shitstorm your life becomes after.
I would have been the guy who stepped on a mine, got blowed up good, lingered in the hospital for a few days, then died.
A couple of Aliens cast members said that they’ve had a bunch of guys tell them over the years that they enlisted because of that movie – that movie where nobody gets laid and all the marines die from corporate exploitation and/or each other’s dumbass machismo, except for the guy who just gets covered in acid.
Good gravy. Well, I guess we all like to imagine ourselves as having the fortitude of character to blow us and our best friend up with a grenade in hopes of slowing down an unstoppable murdering xenomorph.
Best friend? Nobody liked Gorman!
Look maybe the lesson is that most people are too stupid to pick up on a message or theme if it involves the military. Anything short of Springtime for Hitler and people will think its pro war or whatever.
It’s somewhat like the Watchmen quandry: Rorschach is intended to be a completely repellent psychopath, but Jackie Earle Haley did such a fine job in the movie that it’s hard not to root for him at times. (I’ll admit that I stop at the “You’re locked in here with me” line if it’s on.)
Well that’s at least 70% because Zack Snyder shot him as a cool slo-mo action badass, and left out some of his repellant aspects.
What, it wasn’t because of Big American Titties?Remember, Ed Burns don’t do what he does because of honour, duty, patriotism, Freedom™. He doesn’t get his courage from the flag, from mom’s apple pie, or baseball.He did it because a customer at his family 1930s Victoria secret got her girls out at the back of the store, just for him. She popped out those chest hams, perky, full, double-ds, like a good American girl bringin’ a good American boy into line to grit his teeth through the blood and gore and death and maiming and remember that a girl who was born with a giant set of melons told him it’ll be ok. When he’s watching his friends be killed, when he’s ramming hot .308 of an inch of Democracy into Nazis, he’s doing it because some chick with a set of sweater hams bigger than your head told him to. That’s why they fight. Because a chick told them too. And if he doesn’t, he’s committed the gravest sin of all: letting down a chick with more milk-making capacity than the state of Wisconsin. Boobies.Truly, women are the biggest victims of war.
I get the sense that Spielberg never really knew what to make of the film’s plot. It would play great as a bleak anti-war comedy, and maybe in the 50s it would have made a schmaltzy movie about a grieving mother wanting her son back (and it is very loosely based on a true story). But here it plays like nothing other than a self-consciously weird gimmick for a film. Even if Ryan had refused to go home it would make more sense. Spielberg’s great filmmaking covers up the central absurdity while you’re watching, but he can’t get around it for ever.As for There’s Something About Mary, it wasn’t just a gross-out comedy, it was a romantic comedy that men were willing to go see, which maybe explains its success.
“But there’s also some clear baby-boomer soul-searching going on there—a generation of middle-aged men thinking about the sacrifices their families had made, wondering if they could’ve put themselves through the same things.”As noted, this is what makes the bookends so weak. There’s a remove for all the technical brilliance and great performances. A while back I watched William Wellman’s Battleground, a movie about the Battle of the Bulge that came out in 1949 and was written by a guy who was actually over there, it’s a great movie that I’m convinced Spielberg borrows from for this (a surprisingly brutal hand-to-hand fight that Spielberg turns around for the Goldberg scene, some painful and ironic deaths). And there is a lot of grousing and even cowardice throughout, as well as heroism. But it’s contemporary in a way Spielberg can’t be and the movie openly pleas for people not to forget how these battles happened and why they needed to happen, a mere five years after the war. The filmmakers could already see where things were going. Anyway, it’s very much worth checking out.
As someone that owns probably 50+ war movies on DVD, and sits in Memorial Day Weekend to watch TCM, I have to say Battleground is one of the greatest of WWII movies. Always glad when people have seen and recognize it.
I picked it up on a whim during a Blockbuster close-out years ago having never heard of it at all and only watched it fairly recently, it really caught me off guard with how great it was. And it did pretty well at the time, got a couple of Oscars. But while I’m not a movie expert or anything I think I have a decent basic knowledge and this seems to have fallen off the map (maybe the because of the lack of John Wayne or another big-name lead?). It’s sad that a movie about not forgetting is so forgotten.
I have weird feelings about the whole plotline of Upham insisting on letting the one German soldier go, only to execute him laterTo me, that plotline shows Upham losing his idealism. The German was supposed to stop fighting after he was released and didn’t. Those were the rules. Give a guy his parole, he isn’t allowed to fight anymore. He probably couldn’t without his own officers killing him, but Upham wasn’t going to think that through in that moment. It also works as a stand in for America losing it’s idealism about the war. I think Saving Private Ryan was the first time I saw American soldiers in WW II depicted as killing enemy soldiers who had surrendered because it was expedient, even if it was a war crime. Maybe the first time I had seen them even talk about it on screen. Previously, it had only been the Nazis and Japanese committing war crimes and the Americans defeating them even though they “played by the rules.”
The beach assault is rightfully considered a masterpiece of war realism. But the scene that I have never been able to forget and that still gives me nightmares is the hand-to-hand combat between Adam Goldberg’s character and the German. When Goldberg suddenly realizes that his antagonist has enough of the upper hand that he won’t be able to escape, his brain starts trying to find any possible way to delay or alter the inevitable outcome. Maybe the German will stop and translate what he’s saying; maybe, if he says “Wait!” loud enough, the knife will halt its excruciating downward trajectory. That desperation, followed by a horrified agony that remains on his face after he dies… I can’t ever forget it.
Meanwhile the German is “shushing” him, practically begging him to just accept the outcome and let it happen. The fight’s over, it’s okay.
I understand enough German that I got the gist of what he was saying and you’re right, that makes it even worse.
I think Band of Brothers did that, and everything else, better. Somehow, I think Tom Hanks thinks so, too. He looked at Ryan, thought, “Man, I fucked that up”, and went to HBO to get Brothers made. Because that is a goddamn masterpiece.
This. This is why I can’t watch this film again. Not the Normandy scene, as brutal as it is, but this scene. It’s just too much of a violation to watch an American Jewish soldier killed by a goddamn Nazi like this. It killed me watching it, nearly brought me to tears, and the cowardice that Upham has in not saving him, it just devastates me. If I’m misremembering that, forgive me because I haven’t seen it in so long it may have faded, but nothing from Mellish’s death from the German has faded from me. Can’t watch it again.
The suspicions behind Shakespeare In Love winning over Private Ryan have been confirmed since its come out that shitweasel Weinstein reportedly bullied and strong-armed the academy into voting for Shakespeare.
Which pretty well set the template for the Weinstein Way. SiL is a clever, entertaining movie and that’s great. But it was NOT the best film of the year.
SiL was a movie I saw (and wanted to see) multiple times. SPR was a great experience and a masterpiece but I never wanted to see it again. Personally, I rank movies higher when they make me want to see them repeatedly than when they make me want to never see them again.
That’s not an unreasonable metric. Another is staying power, and people had forgotten about SiL within a year while this one obviously is now considered a classic.
I keep thinking you’re all talking about Son-in-Law when I see SiL.
Considering the sexual harassment Weinstein did to Pathrow in order to coerce her to be in it, it sounds like she wants to forget about it too.
Pfft, speak for yourself. I’ve watched SiL numerous times since it came out, and aside from my initial theatrical viewing of SPR I’ve never gone back to it.
Now *that* is a debatable statement. I’m not sure if I agree or disagree, but an argument is still warranted.
I wish staying power mattered more. The King’s Speech should have been beat by no less than 3 of the other movies that ran against its forgotten ass.
SiL is also considered a classic. I’ve seen it many, many times and have only seen SPR once. Any Shakespearean actor has memorized that script. “Come ruin or rapture, and nothing to be done!”
He was always a pathetic fucker, from the way he gamed for Oscars, how he changed movies like Gangs of New York, and oh yeah, being a rapist monster. Fuck Harvey.
Ugh. Judi Dench got a best supporting actress Oscar for five fucking minutes in that movie. There’s no way you can tell me that wasn’t fixed.
Yeah, but those five minutes are all hers. Beatrice Straight won for “Network” and spoke a grand total of 260 words. That’s barely more than a cameo.
I think that was the Academy’s way of saying sorry for her not winning for Mrs Brown. I mean Helen Hunt is erm….good in As Good As It Gets, but even she felt Judi Dench should have won Best Actress. Without wishing to get all colonial about it, the only American actress beating four Brits nominated in that category seemed a bit suspect.
The fix was in, but at the same time, the field of nominees didn’t leave many options. (I guess Kathy Bates in Primary Colors?)
He did not fill out the ballots for them (that I know of). I still prefer that movie and usually watch it whenever I run into it. Saving Private Ryan, not so much; I would spend the time instead watching Band of Brothers.
He did not fill out the ballots for them (that I know of)You can’t be serious? Especially if you had actually read my post where I specifically said: “bullied and strong-armed the academy into voting for Shakespeare”. Where did I or anyone say anything about him doing any of the ballots himself?
No, I can. You can scream at someone to vote a certain way, but how do you know if any given individual listened to you, if it is a secret ballot? I do not like Weinstein or his tactics either, but how exactly could he enforce what he wanted? If they like Saving Private Ryan better, what was to stop them from voting for it?
You don’t like Weinstein, but here you are having a stupid and pointless argument jumping through hoops defending and justfying him because you really like Shakespeare in Love?!? Have you been living under a rock the past few years where people in the industry have admitted that he intimidated them into doing what he wanted including voting for that movie over Ryan? Even Gweneth Palthrow has said he harassed her and almost raped her in order to be in it and his other movies, and they constantly fought during the production of it?Saying again: you can’t be fucking serious?
Calm down. I am defending the right of people to vote however they want, regardless of what the psychotic tyrant serial rapists says that you should do. Or just maybe, his reign would not have lasted as long. If they cannot fill out a secret ballot any way that they want, they sure will tolerate a lot of bad around them.
I cannot think of any parallels in modern America.
In this case people, didn’t vote the way they wanted you fucking idiot. They voted because the big studio mogul who used the same bullying, creepy, and initimidating tactics to harass and rape women did the same thing to push people to vote for his movies and it worked. People in the industry have admitted as much. And yes, it is wrong that people tolerated him and his bullshit for all of these years, and thats the damn point and a bad thing you moron. FFS. What are you even trying to say and argue here other than you not accepting the fact that this movie that you really like won under extremely sketchy circumstances?
An enabler is an enabler, and I do not have to respect their choice on what is, again, a secret ballot. Tell the bully what he wants to hear, then vote for Spielberg instead. They do not annouce the vote totals. Which one of us is behaving more like Weinstein right now, oh person who cannot tolerate dissent without flipping out.
No, I can. You can scream at someone to vote a certain way, but how do you know if any given individual listened to you, if it is a secret ballot? I do not like Weinstein or his tactics either, but how exactly could he enforce what he wanted? If they like Saving Private Ryan better, what was to stop them from voting for it?
“I’m here to bring the gravitas!”
I loved that show when it was on. I often wonder what Peter Scolari thinks of their respective career arcs.
I just looked him up, and I knew he had worked steadily but I hadn’t realized how many roles he has played since Bosom Bodies. He won an Emmy for Girls, I assume as Lena Dunham’s boyfriend (I’ve never watched Girls).
Scolari plays Dunham’s father on Girls.
He may not have got the Oscars, but this was one of my faves as a lad:
I loved Newhart.
Hi, I’m Larry. This is my Private Ryan, and this is my other Private Ryan.
excellent
Newhart counts for something.
We know what happened to Sunny.She ran off with Dan Ackroyd.
Apparently Harvey Weinstein, during an Oscar campaign, was pushing the narrative that this movie was “really just the first twenty minutes.” If there’s a better example of the “the worst person you know made a good point” meme, I’m not sure what it is.
Armageddon was on tv once when I was traveling with my girlfriend and we watched the entire thing. She was awestruck at how dumb the movie was. It’s very entertaining, but in a jokey way. Saving Private Ryan is legitimately good, even if it runs a little too long and the middle parts kinda fizzle
…The Waterboy and Doctor Doolittle and Rush Hour and Godzilla and Patch Adams, all of which were top-10 movies…Jesus. That’s more horrifying than the D-Day scene. What a grim year.
Of all of those, it’s Patch Adams that fills me with the most loathing. Even over Godzilla.
It’s close though. Holy shit is Godzilla 98 terrible. It does literally nothing a Godzilla movie should do.
Didn’t see it at the time, but I caught up with it later on. Roland Emmerich fully bought into his own hype after ID4. I like Matthew Broderick, but he did not belong in this role and even he seemed to realize this. The CGI looks crappy and then there’s the pathetically hacky ‘humor’ (Animal’s wife is a shrew! No one can get Nick’s name right! Mayor Ebert and his assistant Gene!). Yikes.
I think Patch Adams was when I turned on Robin WIlliams.
Was it before or after bicentennial man? *Shudder*
I ahve no clue. Bicentennial Man just looked so awful that I’m sure that contributed to my dislike of RW. These movies were so twee. I liked his dark turn in Insomnia and 12 Hour Photo.
That was also the putrid, emotionally manipulative and cloying stretch that included Jack and Jakob the liar.
Both cloying and twee. My other problem is in interviews he can’t sit still and has to act like he’s on cocaine even though he hasdn’t unsed it in years. We get it you are a hyperactive manchild. Jim Carrey is like this as well.
You do know that he’s dead right? You’re comment makes it sound like you think this is an ongoing problem.
The nightmares.
The worst part of bicentennial man is that the concept of the story seemed pretty interesting but the execution was horrid.
Wasn’t it a Pholip K. Dick story or something? I’m too lazy to look it up.
I had never seen that movie before and my wife made me watch it. It gets a lot of undeserved flak but its…not a great movie
I’ll defend Rush Hour with my last breathe, very good funny film. Chris Tucker is just the right side of bearable and has great chemistry with Jackie Chan.
Damon does take you out of the movie a bit, and frankly at that point in his career his acting skills weren’t up to scenes like the one of him cracking himself up talking about his brothers nearly burning the barn down (which comes off very forced).But to me Danson was the mistake. Giamatti and Farina were enough of character actors that they didn’t stick out, and Fillion was just getting going. But I couldn’t help but say “hey, Ted Danson!” when he showed up in a five-minute part. I love the guy, and I love this movie, but that was a misfire.
And in that scene, Ryan makes the mistake of telling Miller about personal stuff, only to have Miller die. It is the thing that Miller had tried not to do throughout the whole movie.What a twist!!
Damon’s story telling is the weakest part of the movie (with the exception of the bookends.) The amount of outlandish detail makes it clear this was a Damon ad-lib and it reeks of bullshit. He leaned on that “aw, shucks” folksy gimmick a few times in his early career.
This movie is fascinating beyond belief. I’m somewhat annoyed that I wasn’t allowed to see it in theaters when I was a kid but now that movie theaters are renting out full cinemas for a relatively cheap price, I may very well get my chance.
It was the first R movie I saw in theaters, and boy did it deliver.
This is yet another film I wish I experienced in theaters for maximum effect. I watched it on a screen no bigger than that on an airplane flight
Slight spoilers below for a very old movie, I guess:This is a great movie, but the thing I remember most about it was seeing it with a group of friends and the discussion afterwards. We came out of the theater, and one of my friends looked very puzzled. We asked him what was wrong, and he bellowed: “Who the hell is Earnest?!” Apparently, when Hanks whispers “earn this”, he thought he was saying “Earnest” and couldn’t figure out why. We made fun of him mercilessly for years for this gaffe.However, my wife told me recently that she also initially thought Hanks said “Earnest”. So maybe this is more common than I realized and we all owe my long suffering buddy an apology?
Everyone knows Ernest is the “ Hey Vern” guy
Saving Private Vern: Ernest Goes To War.
Ernest Scared Stupid from PTSD?
I remember talking with my grandfather about it – he was a Korean War vet – and he said it was really well done, but what surprised him was “Private Ryan didn’t have legs.”Now, he’d worked in theatrical sales for a good portion of his career and was talking about how he thought it would hold the box office much longer than it did. Despite having grown up on Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, which routinely pitched jokes about Variety and the intricacies of contract signings to 8-year-olds like “This is what you kids are into, right?” I wasn’t fully versed in showbiz lingo at the time. So I thought he’d just dropped a big ol’ spoiler on me. (Also I just looked it up and it held #1 for a month straight, which was still pretty common for a major release at the time, so I don’t know what he was expecting from it.)
My local theater ran SPR for three days before replacing it. Life in a small town sucks.
To be fair, it didn’t come out that long after Born on the Fourth of July.
And then a few years later Hanks and Spielberg produced Band of Brothers for HBO, which extended Ryan’s style of war movie into franchise television with The Pacific and the upcoming Masters of the Air. Feel like this film really started, or rather re-popularized, the dormant genre of war films, expanding it to other mediums like Tom mentioned. Band of Brothers was great. Certainly many of the action sequences and dramatic moments were as devastating as Ryan, incredible even if not benefiting from Spielberg’s hand. The Pacific was a bit different, but went for a visceral dread of the horror and misery of war that that Ryan and Brothers did not really approach. If any of these related works could be termed anti-war, it was certainly The Pacific.
The Pacific was terrifying. The whole rarely actually seeing the enemy you’re fighting, and when you do, they’re a boobytrapped corpse was really horrifying.
From Peleliu on, The Pacific is a straight up horror movie. With The Old Breed is a fantastic memoir, told completely straight, and the series did a great job with it. From the meat-grinder atmospherics to Sledge’s character arc, it’s just so on point.
The film technique used to represent CPT Miller’s perspective after he presumably was concussed is brilliant. It has become almost cliched now, but was this an innovation at the time? I can’t remember a previous film with a similar sequence.
I asked that elsewhere upthread too. Yeah, that’s everywhere now (including games), but I can’t remember it anywhere earlier than this movie.
All y’all calling the ending scene schmaltz can GFY because that’s one of the few movie moments to ever get me to choke up.
Despite trying to be in-the-know with new films back then, I somehow didn’t know about the opening beach scene going into the movie. I was wide-eyed and nearly breathless the whole time.That feeling became very real a couple years later when my great-uncle recounted to me his experience storming the beach at Tarawa. None of us (mom, uncles, brother) ever heard him speak of it before or since, but in that moment he decided to share it with me. I’m not sure why. But I was able to hear a personal account similar to the opening of Saving Private Ryan.
Jesus Christ, Tarawa…
I’m guessing you’re so very thankful you didn’t have to write about Armageddon instead. I know I am.
I bet it was the major factor in doing this by “North American gross” instead of “worldwide gross”
….but I wanted an Armageddon write up. That film is crazy stupid fun.
Another example of a best picture movie fading into obscurity while a better picture that did not win goes on to live a long popular life. I, like others, had forgotten “Shakespeare in love” existed.
Plenty of people love Shakespeare in Love. And they should, it’s a great movie, better than this one, which is just one war movie cliche after the other.
Thanks for weighing in, John Madden.
Shakespeare in Love is hardly obscure.
But no one remembers or cares about it either. And now its come out all of the awful evil shit Weinstein did to Palthrow, to bullying and threatening everyone to get it it’s Oscar, it will definitely fade into notoriety and obscurity.
That seems more like what you want to be the case than what actually is the case.
What is with you Shakespeare in Love fanboys trolling and stanning hard for Harvey fucking Weinstein?
[citation needed]
I enjoyed Shakespeare in Love when I rented it from Blockbuster a gazillion years ago, but the only time it seems to be discussed is as a movie that shouldn’t have won Best Picture. I haven’t had any urge to watch it again. I did re-watch Saving Private Ryan at some point, and I re-watched the opening battle scene not too long ago. It was harrowing enough that I didn’t mind turning it off when my kid was coming in the room.
Are you kidding? Plenty of people love SiL.
Still to this day anytime i recalibrate my surround sound or a friends, Saving Private Ryan is the go to test for 5.1 sound. just from an audio aspect, the Normandy battle is incredible.
That “There’s Something About Mary” clip is a good reminder we need more Keith David in comedies. An Odd Couple situation with Keith David would work. Sprinkle in cameos from Larry David.
Funnily enough, I also watched There’s About Mary about a week ago for the first time. A ton of the humor does not age well, but some gags still work and it’s more clever structurally than it needed to be.
When Shakespeare In Love beat out Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar, it was a jarring and suspicious upset.If there’s one thing the members of the Academy can agree on, it’s that Steven Spielberg can go fuck himself.I’m honestly curious how Spielberg’s movies will be regarded fifty years from now (and hopefully there will still be people around then to regard them, and movie screens onto which to project them). Hitchcock was famously dissed at the Oscars time after time, and now he’s revered and his techniques are studied while his more-celebrated contemporaries are mostly forgotten. What are today’s neglected masterpieces that future generations will be inspired by?
He won Best Director twice, including for Saving Private Ryan, so…
They didn’t do that out of hating on Speilberg. They did it because Harvey Weinstein coerced and presssured them to.
Raiders of the Lost Ark seems like a pretty timeless classic.
E.T. is his masterpiece, even allowing for the overly manipulative third act.
You are going to think that I’m a monster but I’ve always disliked ET. Even was I a kid.I recently watched War of the Worlds and htought it was pretty good. I like the sound the spaceships make.I also watched recently Close Encounters. It was pretty good but not amazing.I suppose I should watch Jaws next.
Then try 1941, it’ll make you appreciate all his good films even more.
Jaws will be 50 soon enough, and its pretty well-regarded still.As for your last question, its a trick question. There are no masterpieces of today. Only hyperbole. And that’s the problem. Our current ‘best’ movies in no way compare to what we used to be getting.
Yeah, what a piece of shit that Jaws is. /jerkoffmotion
I loved Patch Adams, What Dreams May Come and Waterboy from 1998. Fight me and I’ll send my stained bedsheets and murderous girlfriend after you!!!
Ah, the first “just leave Matt Damon to rot” film. To me that was the real horror: it is sad that a widow(?) was about to lose her entire family, but the lives lost to give the lady that small comfort (for a PR boost) when she was not the first nor last to experience such pain. Those killed to get him home had families and friends and lives, but this was for America, not them or even the war effort specifically.
The “SPR”/”Interstellar”/”The Martian” trilogy?
For what it’s worth, it was inspired by a true story. The real guy was easy to find and send home, but they really did send him home because all his brothers had died in the span of a month.
A lot of people hate the framing device and I cant argue with that. The thing that really makes me dislike it, and it took me years to realize this, is that you have a character flashing back to a story he didn’t take part in. How does Private Ryan have memories of Normandy and of this unit going to look for him? He wasn’t there! It just makes that part of the movie even more ridiculous.
Upham and Reiben could have filled him in on the details, so he’s not remembering it like he was there, he’s just remembering the incident overall. Like, it doesn’t have to literally be him remembering all the events in real time.
The way the movie goes from his face straight to the guys on the boats in Normandy, with the sound effects drowning out his family, absolutely suggests this is him remembering being there. It’s all there in the editing.
Well, that sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. 😉
I always thought that was a deliberate deception – the film uses these known techniques to trick you into thinking that you’re seeing the old man’s memories of when he was Captain Miller, at Normandy. Therefore you’re given the safety blanket of knowing Miller is fine because your saw him as an old man, meaning it’s a huge gut punch when he dies.Note that the film doesn’t tell you that we’re seeing the old man’s memories, the editing just implies it. It’s a clever bit of manipulation.
Because it’s a trick. The movie wants you to think that the old man is Capt. Miller so that you’d think he’d make it through to the end. It’s not really a flashback; it’s deception.
Edward Burns career never took off since he was type casted as a bargain basement Ben Affleck for films that couldn’t pay for Affleck himself. But IIRC, Burns in general funneled nearly all of his crap film paychecks into his indie work and won out in the end, in that his career is free of taint and scandal, whereas with Affleck and Damon, they are only famous because they sold their souls to Satan incarnate AKA Harvey Weinstein and were outed as being part of the cabal of Hollywood celebrities who actively protected and covered for Harvey for decades as payment for Harvey making them famous.
I have never seen an Ed Burns film that I thought was any good, though.
I watched “The Brothers McMullen” because it was touted as his best film. It’s ok, I guess. Some people have a tiny amount of talent that they manage to parlay into long careers. He’s never done anything exceptional.
The only other Ed Burns movie I can even name is A Sound of Thunder, which……*vomits*
Speaking of Something About Mary, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a theater where every single audience member was laughing as hard as they did at that film. The only one that might challenge it as far as my own theater-going experiences goes might be The Birdcage.
I never really cared for the ending battle it seemed like Miller decided it was more important to get all his men killed than to actually save the bridge. It made a lot more sense to retreat to the other side of the bridge and then blow it once it became obvious there was no chance to save it.
They did save it.
No they didn’t
It’s filmic mastery that scene. Nothing has come close to it since. There was definitely a line drawn pre and post SPR. I give Spielberg a lot of crap but if anyone has doubts about his filmmaking prowess, they should be quashed by this technical marvel.
War movies after that seem to have diverged. You could either go full-on with the carnage, or you could go oddball/stylized, like A Midnight Clear or Three Kings.
For sure. I’d throw Thin Red Line in their as well as stylistic
“Spielberg talked about refusing entry to anyone who showed up late to Saving Private Ryan, though I don’t know how any multiplexes would’ve enforced that.”This reminds me of Psycho, where Hitchcock made it a rule at theaters showing the film that people would not be allowed in the theater after the film had started. Apparently (as the documentary on the DVD explains) back then people would routinely arrive at movies late, sometimes 20-30 minutes after the film started – it was commonplace.I could never understand that. Who were/are these people planning to show up after 1/3 of the movie is over and just wander in, content with only seeing the last 2/3 of the film?
This is the kind of thing that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that it actually happened, but everything I know tells me it’s made up and never happened.
This was before TV people went to the movies much more often whether they knew what was playing or not sometimes just to enjoy the air conditioning. There was also newsreels cartoons and serials before the main feature. This is where the saying “this is where I came in” originated.
This was even common behavior for opera patrons in the 19th century.
Yeah, back in the day, many people went to theaters just for the air conditioning, and movies were mainly shown so that people had something to watch as they sat in the air conditioned room.
It needs to be said how influential this film was on video games. It directly led to the original Medal of Honor and even recent games like COD WW2. Its as influential on FPS as Aliens was on sci fi.
This. Pretty much every war FPS around that period until the 2010s with Modern Warfare pretty much copied from this movie. Even Call of Duty WW2 that recently came out went right back to the Saving Private Ryan formatted D-Day level.
The opening set piece, nearly half an hour of unrelenting gore and pointless death
Seeing how they helped to bring about the end of Hitler’s Third Reich, I’m not sure “pointless” is a word I’d use to describe the deaths that occurred on the beaches of Normandy in 1944.I think the word you’re looking for is “heroic” or “selfless”.
Jeremy Davies, fresh off of … losing the starring Titanic role to Leonardo DiCaprio
Maybe I’m just projecting the Jeremy Davies of Lost and Justified backwards, but that would’ve been one weird-ass version of Titanic.
It would have been weird the other way since he would have had that movie where he bangs his mom made before Titanic.
To Rose:
Well I thought it was as toxic white male masculinity. Shame on AV Club for promoting the pale patriarchy.
Every war movie made after SPR… hard act to follow. Still true.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1998 Post: The Numbers1. Titanic, Paramount Pictures, $443,319,0812. Armageddon, Disney/Touchstone Pictures, $201,578,1823. Saving Private Ryan, Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures, $190,588,7784. There’s Something About Mary, 20th Century Fox, $174,711,9655. The Waterboy, Disney/Touchstone Pictures, $150,042,3086. Doctor Dolittle, 20th Century Fox, $144,155,2597. Deep Impact, Paramount Pictures, $140,464,6648. Rush Hour, New Line, $137,567,4549. A Bug’s Life, Disney/Pixar, $136,426,33410. Godzilla, TriStar Pictures, $136,314,294Wikipedia1. Armageddon, Disney/Touchstone Pictures, $553,709,7882. Saving Private Ryan, Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures, $481,840,9093. Godzilla, TriStar Pictures, $379,014,2944. There’s Something About Mary, 20th Century Fox, $369,884,6515. A Bug’s Life, Disney/Pixar, $363,398,5656. Deep Impact, Paramount Pictures, $349,464,6647. Mulan, Disney, $304,320,2548. Dr. Dolittle, 20th Century Fox, $294,456,6059. Shakespeare In Love, Miramax/Universal, $289,317,79410. Lethal Weapon 4, Warner Bros., $285,444,603
Erm….so how is SPR the box office champ over Armageddon. What figures are AVC using?
Domestic in-year release figures, I think
Okay that makes sense, cheers.
Ryan was the top earner in America; Armageddon won internationally.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post: The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)
Highest new entry!It probably doesn’t make my top 20, no matter how good the beach scene is.
Terminator 2 wedged in between what would be a beautiful Spielberg trio!
He’d also won back-to-back Oscars. Hanks had cashed in some of his goodwill to make his one-for-me directorial debut, 1996’s fantastically entertaining but money-losing That Thing You Do!, Dooooo… Doin’ that thing you dooooo… breakin’ my heart in twooooooGODDAMNIT TOM I’d just about got it out of my head.
RIP Adam Schlesinger. You wrote a hell of a catchy song there (among many others).The scene where they hear the song playing on the radio for the first time is one of the happiest scenes I can remember in a movie.
A friend of mine once suggested that the primary reason Liv Tyler’s character is in “Armageddon” is to assure the audience that Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck’s characters are not in fact feuding gay lovers.
Friggin’ Mary. After the one-two punch of this and American Pie, Hollywood comedies squarely focused on ultra-raunchy poop and jizz jokes for what felt like an eternity. If I’m grossed out, I’m not laughing.
Poop and jizz are both funny, though.
The older I get the more annoyed I become with Spielberg movies. Films I once liked very much I now feel are manipulating me with scenes of unearned sentimentality. Its like painting a detailed portrait using a trowel, moving from drama into melodrama. That’s what made ‘AI’ unwatchable for me.
Tom Hanks was a lot of things, but “hardened soldier” did not come to mind. As box office as he had been, I remember finding him an odd choice to lead a war movie when this was first announced. Revealing that Captain Miller was a school teacher back home was one of those perspective moments that hit me like a ton of bricks. For all the accolades the film got for it’s technical craft, I think Hanks marked a turning point for soldier archetypes onscreen as well.
I disagree with those who say that the movie is ten minutes too long. To me those ten minutes are the most important in the movie. I was going through pretty rough stuff at the time and this “was my life worth it?” kind of hit home.
Just to be “that guy”… When I saw the Mythbusters episode where they test whether or not you can safely hide from machine gun bullets just by ducking under a few inches of water – and to my astonishment proved that you can – it tainted the D-Day scene in this film because of all those soldiers who get shot under the water.
“The Longest Day” is still the best movie about D-Day.
I saw the film in an afternoon matinee. Lots of old men and teenagers in the audience.. Everyone was glued to their seats. But by the closing credits, there was a run on the bathroom. So many veterans were visibly affected by the movie.
Peter Stormare is the only good thing about ArmageddonFight me
After rewatching Armageddon on Disney Plus this week and I forgot how crap the direction is. I enjoyed it when I watched in theatres, but it’s probably the tied for the worst Michael Bay movie with Transformers 2. I know this will never happen because Bay seems like a control freak but if he had someone to reign in his worst instincts he might actually be able to make a good movie. There is no geography to his cuts, just random camera angles spliced together. As well there is overkill on the over the top characters , the opening Armageddon contains, a cab driver wit h the asian couple, the angry old man with his wife and the telescope and the guy walking his dog. All are played like a cartoon. He has no restraint
Spielberg is amazing for being an excellent technical director but also just a dumb guy. The whole question of the film of whether the war is worth fighting is just shrugged at in the end and mumbled yes. Just dumb. Probably one of the most important films to understand the zeitgeist after 9/11 and boomer delusion about the greatest generation.
Spielberg is amazing for being an excellent technical director but also just a dumb guy. The whole question of the film of whether the war is worth fighting is just shrugged at in the end and mumbled yes. Just dumb. Probably one of the most important films to understand the zeitgeist after 9/11 and boomer delusion about the greatest generation.