Rating: 
Summary: Well Made.
Review: This is one of those films which were really well made. As I watched it I really appreciated the art, even if I didn't enjoy it very much. That, in reality, may be the point. One of the first scenes in the film shows the invasion of Normandy. It seems so real; it almost seems too real. I almost felt like a "peeping tom" as I watched it. I felt bad for the real men who died facing gunfire on those beaches. This, by the way, is the first twenty minutes. Afterwards the movie calms down a bit, but there are still alot of very tense scenes as a group of soliders search throughout Allied Controlled France for one private, Private Ryan. Their job is to find him and take him back home. While the storyline seems inplausible, even the people in the DVD struggle with their mission, it is a useful tool for showing us different aspects of the war. This was a dark, bitter, sad movie. It had great moments, but it really suceeded in showing some of the real horrors of war. I know war is horrible. I didn't need to see such detail in my home. Again, I think this was the point of this film. It suceeded admirably. I could appreciate the efforts, but not enjoy the results. Since, generally, I watch films to enjoy myself, I couldn't recommend this film to others of the same mindset. If, however, you want a detailed and very graphic view on how war can be, this film hits the mark. This film, by the way, should not be seen by children.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring!
Review: The Longest Day, which was filmed in the early 60's, was an exiting movie that caught the movie viewer's attention. Saving Private Ryan VHS~ Tom Hanks on the other hand has a sedative quality to it and apart from the beginning scene, i.e., the storming of the beach, the movie is quite boring and one finds oneself having the urge to press the fast forward button several times. To bad, when it could have been an epic, e.g., The Eagle has Landed, Longest Day, Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone; however, with such an uninteresting script and Tom Hanks sleepwalking throughout the movie it gets what it deserves and what it, i.e., Saving Private Ryan VHS~ Tom Hanks deserves is merely 2 stars when it could have received so many more.
Rating:
Summary: 20 minutes of spectacular footage do not make a great film.
Review: At the beginning of the beach landing scene (starting with the amphibious warships) I was was glued to me seat. However, the glue lost its adhesiveness about 20 minutes into the film. The most crucial fault with this movie is its imbalance of mental and bodily war stress. (You guessed it- the movie focuses too much on a physical war). Of course, Spielberg's intent was to make a homage to those who gave their lives for their country. If you're a patriotic American, you will love this. If you are not a patriotic American (me), you will not love this. In other words, the movie was not a great war film, but rather a great drama about courage and hope. The end becomes too silly for Spielberg to have won best director. Please, leave superhero stuff out of these kinds of films. Now that I have bashed the film, I'll focus on the technical aspects. The movie wholeheartedly deserved every technical Oscar it won (with the possible exception of Best Film Editing). Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer, puts you inside the battlefield because the footage looked authentic and real. The sound crew did the most outstanding job because they took the viewer out of the spectator role and into the role of being a participant in battle. You heard every gunshot, every explosion, every blood-curdling scream. The entire technical crew deserves a round of applause for making an average film look better than it actually was. In short- whether or not you like this movie all depends on your taste.
Rating: 
Summary: Shows why "the horrors of war" is such a good phrase
Review: This film deserved all the accolades it received. I myself have never seen any kind of combat, thank God. However, some of my friends' fathers, and other relatives, in the town where I grew up, had served in Vietnam... I remember listening to a lot of stories about this kind of thing, over friends' houses for dinner. A couple thoughts -- I wish people could try to translate some of the energy this film stirs up into some kind of positive force. Everyone seems to focus on the merits of this AS A MOVIE... we forget that this is the real world, and RIGHT NOW, as you are reading this, there are at least a dozen wars just like this going on somewhere in the world. Real people dying, slowly, in incredible pain, just like in this film... Reading some of these reviews, I'm sort of reminded of a scene at the end of Douglas Adams's "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" where Douglas Adams makes fun of a group of aliens ("Golgafrinchans") who go around making documentaries and "authentic filmic experiences" about the life-or-death troubles in their world, without it really REGISTERING for them mentally that documentaries don't do anything to SOLVE the problems they depict... Not that I personally see ANY hope at ALL for eliminating the human impulse to fight wars. I don't see any. Absolutely none. Zero. But maybe we could at least put more money into developing technologies for spaceflight, so we can at least have the possibility of having a few descendants somewhere out there, so the next big war like this might not totally destroy all of humanity. How much did it cost to shoot this film? How much did it make? Couldn't we have taken one or two percent of the proceeds, and put it toward efforts to develop less expensive means of spaceflight? Also, I just wanted to say that I think Adam Goldberg did one of the best jobs of portraying someone dying that I can imagine. It isn't wacky, or cool, like little kids playing cops and robbers shooting each other. He's just a guy who can't believe that his life might actually END right in the middle of the day, with his friends just a few yards away -- all he can say is "Wait! Stop! Just hold on a minute! Let me think," but of course the enemy soldier just twists the knife, and kills him just the same. This is a horrifying movie, but it's good to mull it over. Worth seeing.
Rating: 
Summary: Hollywood at its usual worst
Review: How can a movie with so much violence, blood, and profanity be so well liked by a "Christian" society? I don't care how supposedly accurate this movie portrayed the soldiers emotions and conditions, they still shouldn't have been so immoral. This is America, the Christian nation, founded by God, and ruled by the lord Jesus Christ. Cursing and swearing are not good Christain activities, and I just don't agree with their glorification of these things. For a real movie about a battle you should all watch Left Behind, based on the books written by Tim and Jerry. They are great and they tell the story of the rapture which is sure to be coming soon with filth like this being shown in todays homes. Instead of Saving Private Ryan maybe you should all try saving yourself in the eyes of the almighty lord. Praise be to Jesus!! More Christians need to stand up and do the lords work and get rid of ideas other than ours!!
Rating:
Summary: epic war story for the ages
Review: I love to hear as much as i can about WW2 movies games etc. but when this came out i knew it was my mission to see it. The movie takes place as everybody knows in WW2, it is about a squadron of men,lead by tom hanks, who are sent to find a missing Private named James Francis Ryan. But before they can set out on their journey they half to get through hell, yeas I am talking about the beaches of Normandy. They manage to get through the devistation that awaits them on the beach and set out for Private Ryan whose two brothers were also killed , and the Army decided to give him Honorable Discharge as an act of good will towards him and his family. This movie is a tearjerker from the scenes of death, but it makes you realize that they gave their life for their country and you.
Rating:
Summary: A brutal, sprawling epic
Review: Steven Spielberg is considered one of the best and most accomplished directors before he made this memorable film. With epics like Schindler's List and Jurassic Park already under his belt, Spielberg set to make a movie with such depth and vision. The cinematics in this movie is superb, the grayish color and bloody scenes are undeniably irresistable. Saving Private Ryan, I feel, was robbed of its oscar for best picture. Shakespeare in Love had no where near the moral and depth that this movie had. Saving Private Ryan will have a lasting impact on the world.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing wake up call.
Review: "Saving Private Ryan" is one of those films that even if you haven't seen it, you've undoubtedly heard about it. You have probably heard about the first 10 minutes being some of the most brutally realistic of all the movie footage attempting to show war. Both this reputation and the rave reviews that the movie has received are completely justified in this reviewer's opinion. The movie in general emphasizes the brutality of war, how people "just like us" had to go through hell, and how a lot of it was completely random and nonsensical. For those of us lucky enough to not have to face warfare, this movie opens your eyes to the incredible fear and uncertainty that these men faced and how lucky we are that we did not happen to be born in the mid 1920's or earlier, or that we currently do not reside in countries that are undergoing such warfare. It also makes you understand how lucky you are that these men were willing to give the ultimate sacrifice so that we can enjoy the life we do today. The movie, as you probably know, starts out with the D-day invasion of Normandy, where thousands of American soldiers were pushed shipped to the shore of "Omaha beach" to face a seeming wall of bullets that cut through most of them killing them on the spot. Spielberg's footage of this scene approximates to whatever degree possible, what a an American soldier would have seen as he tried desperately to wade through the dead bodies in the water to seek some limited shelter on the dunes. There is no sense to the action that we see, only little clips of men being torn apart by metal in a very unglamorous way. One soldier speaking to another one second would face a dead, mangled corpse the next. There was no time for crying or thinking, one had to simply keep going despite whatever agony these men must have been feeling - the fear must have overridden this completely. We follow Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), as he makes his way to the dunes and somehow miraculously is able to breach the German machine guns mowing down Americans at a ridiculous rate. Afterwards we see how the devastation that these men had to go through finally comes out in the uncontrollable crying after the fear has finally subsided. Miller soon gets a special assignment that he questions and makes the viewer question, despite our initial acceptance. A mother has lost three of her four sons in the war within the last week. She will soon get three telegrams. .... Despite the protestations from some of those around him, he decides to send a small squadron of men to go find the fourth son, and ferret him to safety so that his mother would not lose her last son to the war. Her son being Private Ryan, and the Squadron chosen being Miller's. Though initially we feel for the mother, through Miller's protestations and later those of his men, and eventually even Ryan himself, we come to the realization that this mission is more political or a personal issue for the general rather than something that coincides with the rest of the war effort. .... The squadron is made up of a number of men who do not really stand out very much. They come from different backgrounds, one Italian, one Jewish. They have their own issues to deal with, such as the medic (Giovanni Ribisi)... But for the most part they are fairly normal men with normal backgrounds. The one character that stands out is that of Corporal Timothy E. Upham (Jeremy Davies), a translator plucked from the beach after all the reinforcements arrived. Upham seems like he could have been a modern-day college student thrown back in time. He has only touched a gun in a brief basic training and is so fearful about the possibility of actually seeing combat that he is almost useless. Because of this, we can identify with him more than with any of the other soldiers who have been through the hell of Omaha Beach. The DVD has an excellent 5.1 DD soundtrack that really puts you on the battlefield with lots of subwoofer and rear-channel usage. The picture is similarly good, though you can tell that there's an intentional graininess to provoke a sort of newsreel quality to the film. There are some special features, including cast and crew bios, trailers, production notes, a short speech by Steven Spielberg, and a making-of featurette. The featurette is very good, including clips from the film, interviews with cast and crew, as well as historians like Stephan Ambrose. Through these interviews, and especially through Ambrose, who's eloquent and moving oratory matches his literary talent, it really sinks in how amazing it was that men like those around us today, who had never held a gun before, suddenly were thrust into such inconceivable violence and chaos and did this willingly for the good of the country and the cause. This is really something that jars you from the cynicism inherent in our society today.
Rating:
Summary: Doubles my respect for WW2 veterans!
Review: I never thought a movie could do to me what this one did: It made me cry! I have never cried from a movie before. Now I see what my grandfather and his peers experienced, and I have so much more respect for any veteran of any war. Saving Private Ryan begins with a true to life portrayal of D-Day and follows the touching story of a captain's mission to rescue the last living member of four brothers. All of the horrors and sadnesses of war are protrayed in full color. Shocking and graphic, yet intellegent and thoughtful, this movie has given me the thought to enter the military and uphold what these men fought for, and that is what I am going upon my high-school graduation.
Rating:
Summary: Response to the "Movie Great...DVD Flawed" review
Review: The author of another review about this film (you've probably read it on the front page)has written about an apparent fault on the DVD. His complaint was that some of the shots have a white glare which distorts the picture. I'm hope he reads this, because it is certainly not a fault! That glare is a deliberate special effect by Spielberg to make the picture look as if it is being seen by a soldier with tears in his eyes. It is not a fault! It is also on the VHS version and I saw it on the big screen itself. My advice to the author of that review is that he use his imagination a little more. I know I should talk about my opinion on the film, and I will in another review, but I thought it was important to mention this.
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