Saving Private Ryan Review (1998)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Robert Rodat
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Jeremy Davies, Matt Damon
Release Date: July 24, 1998

I have seen Saving Private Ryan more times than I can count. Dozens of viewings over nearly thirty years, and I still pick up on something new every time. A background detail in the chaos of Omaha Beach. A look on a soldier’s face in a quiet moment between firefights. The way Tom Hanks holds his hand still when the shaking gets bad, because Captain Miller doesn’t want his men to see it. There are movies you watch and movies you study, and Saving Private Ryan is firmly in the second category. It rewards every single viewing.

I’ll be upfront about something. I am not Steven Spielberg’s biggest fan across the board. There are Spielberg films I think are overrated and Spielberg tendencies that can drive me crazy, the overly sentimental endings chief among them. But what Saving Private Ryan represents is Spielberg operating at a level that transcends whatever reservations I carry about his filmography. This is the best film he has ever made, and I say that fully aware of what else is on his resume. When a director makes something this good you set aside your biases and just call it what it is.

The setup is straightforward. It is 1944, shortly after D-Day. The U.S. Army learns that three of four brothers in the Ryan family have been killed in action, and that their mother is about to receive all three death notices on the same day. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall orders a squad dispatched behind enemy lines to find the surviving brother, Private James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), and bring him home. Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) and seven men are given the mission.

On paper it sounds simple. On screen it becomes something else entirely.

Before any of that story even begins, Spielberg opens the film with the Omaha Beach landing on June 6, 1944, and it is one of the most staggering sequences ever committed to film. Twenty-five minutes of pure chaos, violence, and terror that puts you inside the experience rather than watching it from a safe distance. The desaturated color palette, the handheld camera work, the sound design that drops the audio out entirely during one sequence to simulate shell shock, all of it combines into something that feels less like a movie scene and more like a document. Men die before they even get off the landing craft. Others make it twenty feet up the beach. The camera does not look away, and it does not editorialize. It just shows you what it was like, and what it was like was hell.

Nothing in the film that follows quite matches those opening minutes in terms of sheer intensity, but nothing needs to. Spielberg uses that sequence to establish the stakes and the world, and then he lets the story breathe. The journey to find Ryan becomes a character study of eight men under enormous pressure who have almost nothing in common except the mission in front of them. That is where the performances take over.

Tom Hanks is as good here as he has ever been, and Tom Hanks has been very good in a lot of movies. Captain Miller is a complicated man. He is quiet and competent and carries the weight of every decision on his face without ever letting it become a performance. There is a scene late in the film where Miller finally tells his men who he was before the war, a small revelation that lands with enormous weight because of how carefully Hanks has built the character up to that point. You understand immediately why he kept it to himself.

But here is the thing about Saving Private Ryan that I do not think gets enough credit: there is not a weak performance in the entire film. Not one. Tom Sizemore as Sergeant Horvath is the steady heartbeat of the squad, the guy who has been with Miller long enough that they communicate in half sentences. Edward Burns plays Reiben, the smart mouth from Brooklyn who questions everything, and Burns brings enough genuine edge to the role that the character never tips into comic relief. Barry Pepper as Jackson, the religious sharpshooter who prays before every shot, is quietly extraordinary. Giovanni Ribisi as the medic Wade has maybe ten minutes of real screen time and still manages to make you feel his death like a gut punch. Jeremy Davies as Corporal Upham, the translator who has never seen combat, is the audience surrogate in the truest sense, and Davies plays his arc with a cowardly authenticity that makes his final moment in the film land like a thunderclap.

Even Vin Diesel, in a relatively small role as Caparzo, leaves an impression. His death scene early in the film, the way it unfolds slowly and painfully while the squad is helpless to do anything, is one of the most wrenching moments in a film full of them.

Matt Damon shows up in the third act as Ryan himself, and what could have been an afterthought role he plays with a kind of exhausted, bewildered sincerity. His reaction when he learns about his brothers is one of the best pieces of acting in the film. He did not know, and watching him process it in real time while strangers stand around him is genuinely devastating.

The screenplay by Robert Rodat holds all of this together with a structure that never feels mechanical. The philosophical question at the center of the film, is any one man’s life worth the lives of the men sent to save him, gets aired out honestly without the movie pretending to have a clean answer. Miller’s men ask it out loud, argue about it around campfires, and ultimately go back to doing their jobs anyway because that is what soldiers do. The film respects that ambiguity.

The final battle at the bridge in Ramelle is where everything converges, and Spielberg stages it with the same ferocious clarity he brought to the opening. By this point you know every man in that squad well enough that each loss hits personally. The battle is strategic and chaotic at the same time, and the way it unfolds feels earned rather than manufactured for spectacle.

And then there is the ending. The older Ryan at the grave, asking his wife if he has been a good man, if he has earned what was given to him. I have seen it dozens of times and it still gets me. That is not a small thing.

Saving Private Ryan won five Academy Awards including Best Director for Spielberg, and lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love, one of the more baffling upsets in Oscar history. History has sorted that out. Nobody is arguing that Shakespeare in Love is the more important film. Saving Private Ryan is the kind of movie that gets studied in film schools, referenced in conversations about the best war films ever made, and watched every Memorial Day by people who want to feel something real.

Watch it again this Memorial Day. And pay attention to Hanks’ hand. And if you don’t already, you should definitely add this masterpiece to your Bluray collection.

Saving Private Ryan gets a five out of five: EXALTED.

If you enjoy this one, you might also like to check out my review of Black Hawk Down or American Sniper, both strong thrillers. Or click here to check out more movie reviews.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.

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