Saving Private Ryan

Steven Spielberg has had forays into World War II before, in films as varied in tone as the silly 1941 to the first and third Indiana Jones to the serious Empire of the Sun and Schindler's List, but his first true war film was Saving Private Ryan, a stirring tribute to the veterans of that war, which included his own father, that also is an unflinching look into the horrors of war. 

Following the Normandy Invasion in June 1944, Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks) is given a unique assignment to travel across the countryside to retrieve a soldier with 101st Airborne, James Ryan (played by Matt Damon), whose three brothers were all killed in action and the War Department has decided to send Ryan home lest the war to avoid wiping out the entire youngest generation of the family. Miller assembles a team of soldiers to go with him, including Tech Sergeant Mike Horvath (played by Tom Sizemore), Privates First Class Richard Reiben (played by Edward Burns) and Adrian Caparzo (played by Vin Diesel), Privates Stanley Mellish (played by Adam Goldberg) and Danny Jackson (played by Barry Pepper), Medic Irwin Wade (played by Giovanni Ribisi) and Cartographer and Interpreter Timothy Upham (played by Jeremy Davies). They set off across the French countryside as they attempt to find James Ryan and get him home safely.

Steven Spielberg was looking for a World War II film project and knew he had found it with the original script by Robert Rodat, loosely based on the story of the Niland brothers. Spielberg and Director of Photography approached the film with a clear goal of not wanting it to look like a polished Hollywood movie, but went for a more desaturated look that matched the color newsreel footage at the time. For the film's most famous sequence, the opening D-Day invasion on Normandy Beach, Spielberg shot it in sequence, starting on the landing boats all the way through the the taking of the beach and beyond in one harrowing sequence. Throughout, they used handheld cameras, which only adds to the visceral and chaotic feeling of the sequence. The film is then bookended with another battle at the climax of the film as Nazi forces close in that is equally intense, if not more so because by this point you know the characters involved intimately at that point. The sound design of the film also deserves a special mention as the effects work they did and it's placement in the overall soundtrack of the film makes each battle sequence in the film that much more intense. 

When casting the film, aside from Tom Hanks, Spielberg specifically cast the film with largely unknown or lesser known actors, trying to cast people who looked the part of WWII soldiers. Of course, this would have worked for Matt Damon in the role of Private Ryan as well if Good Will Hunting, and his subsequent Oscar win for co-writing the screenplay for that film hadn't made him internationally famous overnight. The cast as a whole was at the time mostly made of up and coming actors who all turn in wonderful performances in the film, with Tom Hanks as their commanding officer and the father figure of sorts to the group of young men surrounding him. There are also some surprise cameos of future famous actors, including Nathan Fillion and Paul Giamatti that caught me off guard with my latest rewatch of the film.    

Overall, Saving Private Ryan is one of Spielberg's best films and is an emotionally potent film that one doesn't soon forget watching it. A few years after this film came out, Spielberg and Tom Hanks teamed with HBO to create the mini-series Band of Brothers, about the experiences of the 101st Airborne during World War II off the back of the success of this film and in the process created an equally, if not even better, compelling World War II companion piece. That mini-series would also have it's own spin-off, The Pacific, telling the story of what was going on in the Pacific theater of the war, but wasn't quite as good as either Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. Still, on it's own merits, Saving Private Ryan is a fantastic film and is a monument to the courage of the people who fought in that war while at the same time not shying away from the brutality of it as well.