Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan (2008) – on HD. There are a small handful of films in the last decade or two that has defined entire genres of films that all subsequent productions of the same theme are now matched against. One such film is Saving Private Ryan, a film I caught on the big screen four times during its theatrical run in Singapore, owned the film on DVD and now on Blu-ray.

The 1998 film was directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Tom Hanks in a successful collaboration that they would follow up with two equally acclaimed productions: Band of Brothers, and The Pacific whose TV run has just ended on HBO. The source material for the film comes off several books written by the late Professor Stephen Ambrose, a war historian whose book Civilian Soldiers I think is required reading for any person who wants an insight into the bravery and sacrifices made by what many call “The Greatest Generation” – the men and women who fought in World War II.

Saving Private Ryan is loosely based on a historical incident: four men, all brothers, serve in World War II, but three are killed within a short period of time. The fourth and youngest brother – James Ryan – is believed alive, but his whereabouts in the European theatre of operations is unknown. A small squad of soldiers is led by Captain John Miller (Hanks) and given the mission of finding Ryan and bringing home safely.

That the mission is extremely difficult if not outright suicidal is not lost on Miller’s small squad of men. The US and British armies have just begun their invasion to retake Europe from Hitler, and the soldiers involved in the huge conflict number in the hundreds of thousands all around Normandy France. Not only will Miller’s men have to traverse across enemy territory, they have to try finding a single man in all the chaos. It’s not long when the squad’s ranks get diminished through attrition, and the surviving members start questioning the validity of their orders. As they rightly ask, why should they be risking all of their own lives just to save one person’s.

Saving Private Ryan is bookended by two scenes that have come to define the benchmark that all subsequent big battle scenes are compared against today. The first scene is a 22 minute long scene that shows viewers just a tiny window into the horrors faced by American soldiers as they landed on Omaha Beach in June 1944. Of the four sectors involved in the landings, this particular beach in history was the hardest and where the American forces suffered the heaviest casualties. Spielberg’s production does not for the briefest moment shy away from showing the awful carnage and firestorm the soldiers had to brave through. But to his credit, you never get the feeling that it’s all showy or gratuitous. That has come through the numerous off-angle viewpoints, and the absence of elements that try to elicit specific sentiments from you, e.g. accompaniment music. I remembered watching this first scene 12 years ago at the theatre, and even after returning for the fourth screening in a month, that scene continued to leave me shaken.

The second scene runs in the film’s last 30 minutes, and is an incredibly filmed urban battle between Miller’s small squad and a band of entrenched American paratroopers against superior German forces. As Miller’s squad whittles down to nearly nothing against overwhelming numerical and equipment superiority, you can’t help but feel despair that men you have come to empathize with over the film’s duration are slowly killed in battle one by one. Between the two scenes lie quieter moments of character development interspaced by brief scenes of skirmishes.

But what is really surprising is that when upon the film’s completion, I didn’t feel just mere shock at the horrors of war. Far from it. What I walked away with that afternoon in 1998 from Ang Mo Kio’s old Jubilee cinema was a new found respect and admiration for the sacrifices, bravery and sense of honor those persons before my time experienced just so we can today enjoy a world freed of Hitler’s tyranny.

The technical aspects of the film are all outstanding too. There’s minimal CG use that – nicely – doesn’t look its age at all. The film won five Academy Awards, including for Director, Cinematography, and Sound Editing. John Williams – the film composer whose has frequently collaborated with Spielberg – returned also to write music for this film, and the resultant score for me remains one of the most powerful and moving film scores ever.

What was surprising though, and it for a period of time caused many persons to lose faith in how the Academy was choosing its winners, was that Saving Private Ryan didn’t win the Academy’s Best Picture, despite winning Best Picture awards from just about every other institution worth its salt. The award that year went instead to Shakespeare in Love, a film which while had gorgeous costumes, a witty script and featured a novel twist to a retelling of Shakespeare’s life was ultimately also a comparatively more superficial film. Case in point: who even mentions Shakespeare in Love today as genre-defining for romantic comedies, in the same way Saving Private Ryan is to war films ? No one does.

There are a couple of criticisms that’s been leveled at Saving Private Ryan too, some of which I find undeserving (e.g. British veterans complaining that they aren’t mentioned in the landings they did elsewhere – but Spielberg never intended for the the beach invasion scene to be representative of the entire Allied offensive), but others were legitimate, e.g. a somewhat simplistic script.

In all though, the entire package worked for me, and interestingly, this is the one (and so far only) film that I’ve over the years disagreed with my Missouri bud Matt over. If I had to name just one film that is the “Best Film I Have Ever Watched”, it’s this one.