FLUXEUROPA: SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

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SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Tom Hanks etc

THREE out of four brothers are killed in action, one in the disastrous American D-Day landing on Omaha beach modernistically depicted in all its bloody confusion early in the film. The fourth brother is somewhere in disputed France, having been part of the scattered American airdrop. A group of men under the command of battle-fatigued Captain John H Miller (Tom Hanks) is sent to rescue the surviving sibling (Pvt Ryan) and bring him home. The motivation is partly sentimental and partly an exercise in disaster-limitation if not a publicity stunt.

Americans may not be strong on irony but they're masters of pathos. Whilst European audiences may find the storyline hard to accept and wince at the fluttering Stars and Stripes, the essential nature and strength of this film lie in its extensive action sequences brilliantly captured by the director of photography, Janusz Kaminski. These are graphic, not only in terms of blood and guts (literally) but in what I presume to be their realism and certainly their immediacy. You're made to feel you're actually there and actually quite uncomfortable as bullets tear up the ground. In its graphic and bleak nature the film is comparable in some respects to Joseph Vilsmaier's Stalingrad (1993).

The superficial question posed - but left unanswered - by the film is whether the life of one man is worth the sacrifice of several. But the deeper question is whether any of the men's lives have any significance against the background of numbing horror and seeming pointlessness. In addition to the tension between saving Pvt Ryan and the survival of his rescuers, the lives of both the one and the few stand in dramatic contrast to the mincing machine of mass slaughter.

Rik - 26 January 2000

Saving Private Ryan ~ DVD ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Tom Hanks / Keep Case

Saving Private Ryan ~ VHS ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Tom Hanks, Edward Burns

Saving Private Ryan ~ VHS ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Tom Hanks, Barry Pepper / Subtitled in Spanish

Saving Private Ryan (DTS Edition) ~ DVD ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Tom Hanks, Matt Damon / Keep Case

Saving Private Ryan (Widescreen Edition) ~ VHS ~ Usually ships in 24 hours
Tom Hanks / Widescreen