Rating: 
Summary: The greatest War movie of all time on DVD!
Review: Steven Spielberg's motion picture has became the highest grossing movie fo 1998 with " Titanic" becoming second, acclaimed by critics and audiences alike hailing it as a modern masterpiece, winner of 5 academy awards including for best picture, heck this movie even made it on every critics list of the best movie of 1998.Inspired by the events of D-Day in 1941, Captain Miller ( Tom Hanks) takes his men to protect Private James Ryan ( Matt Damon) from harm cause three of Ryan's brothers were killed in combat, eight men must risk their lives to save Ryan. A brilliant, moving and unforgettable movie that accurately re-creates the actual day of D-day like no other movie has done before, this is very action packed but extremly gory though not for the fainted heart. The script itself is superb, including the acting which makes this a powerful movie experience. The DVD is stunning with great transfer and sound, the extras are good like trailers, Documentary and message from Spielburg himself, for anyone interested in history movies or war flicks then this is a must see.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing achievement, but not all that great
Review: I go back and forth on my feelings about Steven Spielberg as a director. I gushed pretty blatantly about Artificial Intelligence, but on reflection (and several more viewings) I think I was just relieved that he didn't screw it up too badly. Now, I find my review faintly embarrassing. Oh well. Saving Private Ryan has taken longer to percolate. It's great achievement (one worthy of study by film students) is the Omaha Beach invasion on D-Day. My God, what a terrifying sequence. It is, perhaps, the single best sustained action scene in recent memory. Only Kurosawa's devastating castle attack from the middle of Ran eclipses it for sheer apocalyptic horror. It is war as abstraction; the newsreel style a metaphorical fan brush loaded with pigments of green, khaki, and red as it feverishly, even angrily paints its canvas. Other scenes work well, also. In spite of other reviews denouncing the "false moral dilemma" of the captured German soldier and Jeremy Davies' too-soft translator, I believed that most of the guys under Miller's command would, indeed, want to kill the German prisoner. I do. I also believed that someone would probably point out that killing him would do nothing bring back their campadre, and would, in fact, be illegal under the Geneva Convention. Scenes like this, the showdown with the sniper in the bell tower, Caparzo's death, and the long night in the church mostly work - even when the spell is broken by the occasional Oscar Speech (patent pending) from Tom Hanks. By and large, the scenes were well handled, with thoughtful dialog and subtle acting. But, alas, Spielberg could not overcome his ultimate weakness - sentiment verging on unadulterated corn. The book-ending scenes are insulting in the way they ask us to believe not that General Marshall would send soldiers in harm's way to rescue Private Ryan, but that he would do it for sentimental reasons. My complaint is not with actor Harve Presnell, who delivers his lines with great conviction, but with the very idea that a man in his position would actually value the life of a single man over the lives of many. That equation does not wash. Such a mission is realistic (the film is based, we are told, on fact), but the reason behind it would almost certainly be one of propaganda value. Imagine if Spielberg's late friend Stanley Kubrick had made the film: Mrs. Ryan gets telegrams telling her that all but one of her sons are dead and the last is missing. She explodes in anger and grief, forgetting that her sons died to save the free world and focusing instead on her own loss. She calls the papers, she raises a stink, the AP gets hold of the story. Now Washington takes notice and leans on General Marshall - can't we do something to shut this woman up? And thus starts the mission. But no, that would be entirely too realistic. It's not that Americans NEVER send rescue teams to pull lost soldiers out of harm's way (remember Captain Scott O'Grady?); it's that the calculus for launching such an operation hinges on a great deal more than how much the powers-that-be get all dewy-eyed over the thought of sending another telegram to the parents of a soldier. On balance, though, Saving Private Ryan is still a film worth owning. The technical achievement is undeniable; isolated scenes are brilliant. It's just exasperating to see Steven Spielberg sometimes lose his nerve, stop trusting the strength of the material, and go for the sharp stick to the tear-duct.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful Movie
Review: War is Hell. This movie proves that within the first 20 gruesome and wholly shocking minutes. You will be pale and horrified by Steven Spielberg's images. I was aghast the first and last times I watched this experience. That's all for the film. The extras aren't very much at all. Yet the "Director's Words" are great to watch.
Rating:
Summary: Yet another REVENGE film
Review: Wow. It took me a few viewings of this movie to finally realize that SPR is a WWII version of "Deathwish", with Toms Hanks playing the part of Charles Bronson (with plenty of John Wayne mixed in too).
After Hank's character, Captain John Miller, watches fellow American troops get slaughtered at Omaha Beach during the inital D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, the American audience then get the satisfaction of watching of Miller and his squad of Rangers distribute payback against the evil Germans. Some good guy troops of the American 101st Airborne division also help out, and the ending battle climaxes with a handful of tough Americans killing Nazis by the dozens.
Tom Hanks gets to blow-up a German 60 ton Tiger tank with his pistol!
Rating: 
Summary: Only the first 20 minutes are worth watching...
Review: ...the rest of the film is blatantly jingoistic, simple-minded and oversentimental TRIPE! The first 20 minutes however ARE breathtaking and fascinating war-pornography...see men get blown to bits right before your eyes, blood and guts splattering the lens, decapitated bodies still twitching...it's hard not to take your eyes off the screen, this is even better than the combat scenes from "Platoon" and is definitely a cinematic milestone. Just too bad that Spielberg can't help but ruin the rest of the movie with his incorrigibly cornball and infantile view of the world, here with a sizable dollop of "God bless America, geez aren't we great or what?" nationalistic propaganda. The subtext of this movie (for which military recruiters in every country around the world are probably naming their first-born sons after Spielberg) is basically that true heroes are simple, gullible men who follow their government's orders to go out and be cannon fodder without doubt or hesitation...because it's their patriotic and manly duty. The same men who braved the beaches of Normandy also had no choice but to follow their military's idiotic orders to go find some random "lost" soldier whose 4 brothers had already been killed in action. so in order to be a true hero, does that mean that you have to be brave in some situations, but also be totally absurd in others? Soldiers or suckers?
Rating:
Summary: Saving Private Ryan - "Freedom is not free!"
Review: Saving Private Ryan is, of course, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks first tribute to the gallant men who fought in the "war to end all wars." While this exceptional film is not based solely on the actual actions of one unit like their later masterpiece, Band of Brothers', it is clearly the most realistic World War II silver screen blockbuster to date! This film, from the very beginning draws you into the world of these valiant soldiers as they are in the landing craft preparing for the gate to drop and hit the beach. No film prior to this has ever more realistically and poignantly showed the true costs of war, without glorifying those costs. The premise: Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, a Ranger Company Commander whose company is part of the D-Day invasion! A major portion of his company is wiped out during the invasion on Omaha beach and a follow on action in which they had to take out a pair of German 88's. He is then given the mission to find Private Ryan, who's three brothers who were all recently KIA (killed in action). His company is effectively taken away from him, to be used to shore up losses in another company. He takes seven of his best Rangers and sets off on the quest to find Private Ryan who jumped in with 101st Parachute Infantry Regiment the night before D-Day and bring him home safely. Special Features: An exclusive message from Steven Spielberg - which gives Academy Award winning Best Director an opportunity to display his admiration for America's "Greatest Generation." Saving Private Ryan - Into the Breach - which is a wonderful tribute to the men who fought the war and, in part, to those who brought this film to the silver screen. {ssintrepid}
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Epic War Film
Review: Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. They're both the best of the best. This film marks the first time they worked together. I must say, I'm not a huge fan of war movies, but this one really sucked me in. The acting is great along with everything else and the DVD is very good for a single disc. Tom Hanks is one of my favorite actors and he really made this film that much better. This is about the only violent movie I've seen that doesn't glorify violence. It shows the affects of war and impact it has on people and their families. This movie will soon be an American classic (if not already.) It pays a tribute to all those veterans who fought for our freedom, because freedom doesn't come free. This film should be viewed by anyone that calls themself an American.
Rating: 
Summary: Saving Me From This Movie
Review: Any critical interpretation of Spielberg's heavily problematic "Saving Private Ryan" is bound to provoke passionate, even angry, responses; some people defend this movie as religiously as they defend other American myths. To attack the film is to commit blasphemy, supposedly tantamount to attacking America's role in World War II. But a critical account of this overblown epic war film has nothing to do with the history of World War II. They are separate issues, and it is possible to critique this film while still holding that America had a special role in the defining historical moment of the 20th century. Now that this necessary caveat has been made, let the critique begin. "Saving Private Ryan" has all of Spielberg's trademarks, which means it has all of his drawbacks: it's emotionally simplistic and shamelessly sentimental to the point of being offensive (the prologue and the coda at the veteran cemetery are the best examples, as are the musical cues noting when you should feel sentimental); it's deeply manipulative, as are all of Spielberg's films, save a small few (like "Raiders of the Lost Ark"); it offers only a watered-down, massively unsophisticated interpretation of reality, in this case of World War II, portraying the Nazis as cartoonish villians (they were villians, to be sure, but there was nothing cartoonish about them in reality); and it is technically astute but dramatically under-whelming. The last point here is important because much has been made of Spielberg's recreation of the Normandy invasion, seen as impressive in its realism and its scale. But despite the technical bravado and the sheer amount of work that went in to pulling the scene off, Spielberg approaches the invasion with all the subtlety and seriousness of a child. There's little here that is dramatically compelling, and most of the opening half hour actually has no weight -- it's showy and comical and contrived just enough to be trite. As a result, it has an effect opposite to what Spielberg surely intended. The rest of the film suffers from similar problems. On the surface, the idea of focusing on a small band of soldiers and their efforts to rescue the last survivor of four brothers in order to understand the war as a whole (sort of a microcosm as a lesson) seems intriguing and notable, but Spielberg, in typical fashion, can't pull it off. This novel idea, in his hands, gives us no real sense of what the war was about, what was at stake, what sacrifice really meant; under Spielberg's direction, World War II becomes indistinguishable from any other war, nothing more than a bunch of soldiers who want to finish their mission so they can go home, nothing more than a reductive tale that includes some vague notions of good, evil, heroism, and fear. The story meanders without force, to the point where it's difficult to care what happens, which might not seem like much of a criticism until we realize that caring is the one thing Spielberg wants us to do. And if that weren't enough, the film's final sequences entail a climatic battle against Germans that has all the originality, thoughtfulness, and profundity of a typical Hollywood action climax. Sure, the bullets whiz, blood spurts, soldiers fight for their lives, and then the audience cheers loudly when something "good" seems to happen, as if cheering at war is the thing we should really be doing. "Saving Private Ryan" is, at best, a severely flawed and problematic film. Even the cinematography, which has been praised too often, is wrong; the flat hues and dark colors don't fit, and Spielberg, as well versed as he is in the art of movie-making, could still learn a great deal about handheld camera work from a number of directors and cinematographers, including Truffaut and Kalatozishvili. He's a technician, to be sure, but that does not mean that he makes the right decisions. Finally, the DVD as far as quality goes is impressive, but in some sense this film would be better served if it were played endlessly in a hall at Disneyland instead of home theaters; because "Saving Private Ryan" approaches its subject as a child would, and therefore would be perfect in a place devoted to children.
Rating:
Summary: Another whinging Brit
Review: Technically, this is a very good film. Everyone knows about the stunning spectacle that is the initial half an hour. For this piece of action i would be tempted to award full marks. However, the rest of the film soon kicks in. There are so many worthy subjects upon which to base a film about war-the effects on an individual, a better handled pearl harbor-esqe love affair etc ect- so why come up with the ridiculous premise of sending a company of troops in search of one individual just so nice, ol' mama Ryan feels okay. A noble gesture, but theyre fighting a war for Petes sake. My second concern, as a foreigner is twofold. Firstly i am slightly concerned about the nature of the US public and the Hollywood propaganda machine. Spielberg and his ill trained cronies are modern day Goebbels. Does every historical film require a resplendencent picture of the stars and stripes accompanied by some form of emotive music, in order to win the popularity of the audience. Call me a cynic, but these films do nothing more than instruct the viewer that because there is a glorious flag waving in the breeze, not liking this film is an unpatriotic act. Maybe this is all very comforting for the American pshyce, but this very worrying and concerning for the rest of us. This brings me onto my second grievance of films such as SPR. Does the Hollywood machine go out of its way to offend foreigners. Here for example no acknowledgement of any other allied country except a derivative remark about Montgomery. Ditto Pearl Harbor. Even worse with U571. Blatant racist and unjustified depiction of Brits in Braveheart, The Patriot and here of the Germans. Take the evel skin head who is released and comes back to haunt Hanks. All this at a time when surely America needs all the allies it can get. I tell you I am a very worried bunny at the moment. Oh sorry.... the film is okay.
Rating:
Summary: Put on your flak jacket, helmet, and hit Play
Review: I had seen all kinds of war films before sitting down in the theatre to view this film. But I have to say that I could barely sit through the first 30 minutes, it was so intense. Knowing that it happened like that, and even worse, was almost too much. I nearly walked out. Nearly. A rare experience for me a the movies. My problem wasn't that I thought the gore was overwhelming, churning my stomach. It was that I was nearly weeping, sitting there knowing that people actually went through that. I can think of no other film that has had that effect one me. It made me appreciate the effort of our fathers and grandfathers much more. Isn't that the intent of the film? In short, it's the story of a captian, played by Tom Hanks, who leads his squad in the D-Day assault at Omaha Beach. They then get an assignment to find a Private Ryan (Matt Damon), a paratrooper dropped somewhere inland during the invasion. They have to bring him back and send him home alive, because he's the last of the Ryan brothers alive out of the four sent out to war. The acting is good. There's enough dialog to get through the story, but it's the story and journey that count here. Would they have sent six or seven men out, wandering around the French countryside until they found one man? That's debatable, but don't let the question spoil the story. This is about following orders, compassion, duty to country, family, and comrade. The technical details are top-notch. Bullets and explosions act like the real things. The settings are incredibly realistic with bombed-out buildings and the rubble of war. And the sounds couldn't be better. High quality filmmaking throughout. This gets five stars and a buy recommendation because it's one of the best war movies ever, and one of the best-made movies ever. I own the DTS version, without all of the extras, so I can't comment on them.
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