69/100
Third viewing, last seen 2010. Back in the summer of '98, I was preoccupied with a long-distance relationship that saw me flying from New York to San Francisco for one week of every month (and consumed with lengthy, almost ruinously expensive phone calls at other times; no video chat yet), so that I fell months behind on the unpaid movie reviews I then wrote for my personal website. (My "job" was writing video capsules for EW.) Wound up drafting a gigantic catch-up column at year's end that quickly dispensed with no less than 58(!) films that I'd seen but not had time to address. Most of these "reviews" were just a sentence or two, essentially tweets avant la lettre; the one for Saving Private Ryan was just two words:
Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg): Crap crap genius genius genius genius genius genius genius genius crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap genius genius genius genius genius genius genius genius crap crap. Grade: B
While obviously glib in the extreme, this did in fact get the point across—nobody was confused about which parts of the film I considered genius. "Crap," however, was strictly comic effect, excepting the first two and the last two, which I stand behind. (On top of everything else that's irksome about Ryan's maudlin, quasi-nonsensical present-day wraparound, I rolled my eyes hard this time at Old Man Ryan It Turns Out Not Miller After All walking 20 full paces ahead of his family en route to the cemetery, for this is a journey he must Sorta Kinda Take Alone.) Feel free to mentally replace the others with "fine," interspersed with the occasional "nah" and "ugh." In truth, it feels to me as if there's nothing much to say about this revolutionary yet hoary WWII epic that isn't tediously obvious. Does anyone need clarification regarding what makes Omaha Beach the most viscerally harrowing cinematic battlefield sequence since All Quiet on the Western Front? Guess I do have one stray thought: 28 years later, the desaturated color palette and arrhythmic shutter effect, which quickly became clichés via widespread adoption (as speedily as Gladiator), seem somewhat expendable. What makes the sequence terrible, in the original sense of that adjective, is Spielberg + Kamiński + Kahn's orchestration of sustained nightmarish chaos, which demonstrates what wonders those who understand the rules of their craft inside and out can accomplish by judiciously, expertly breaking them. Spielberg usually gets praised for his ability to render cinematic space coherent, such that we always grasp where everything is in relation to everything else; the Omaha Beach landing deliberately trashes that, creating a directionless blur/haze of confusion and agony and raw meat, but does so in a way that's clearly purposeful (and eye-popping) rather than inept. It's a mini-masterpiece diminished only slightly by the fact that one of Ryan's brothers facelessly dying constitutes its only real function in this movie, other than reaffirming that War Is Hell.
My other "genius" stretch was of course the climactic Ramelle bridge battle, which didn't permanently transform how serious-minded action movies are shot but is still plenty rousing in its own right. (Can't overemphasize the impact of Spielberg and his team actually building that enormous set on the Hatfield Aerodrome. Nowadays, most of the surrounding blasted buildings and rubble would likely be digital creations; no matter how realistic the tech gets, I can't help but feel that there's an unconscious feeling of insubstantiality that impedes our engagement.) Even there, though, a "nah" or "ugh" slips in. "As I remembered: stunning battle scenes, rest wildly variant, often even within a given scene," reads my 2010 tweet reaction, and I suspect that last phrase may refer to Mellish's unforgettably horrible death (desperately trying to talk his way out even as the knife's slowly pushed in) competing with Upham's risible "character arc," which sees him learn that mercy and compassion are for suckers. (It's not even that I object to so much as the hokey "irony" of Upham murdering Steamboat Willie after inexplicably being ignored on the stairs after Mellish is killed.) Body of the film's not generally bad, just comparatively ordinary/familiar, leaning hard on established G.I. stereotypes; there are only a few moments that make me wince, e.g. Captain Miller suddenly revealing his personal history at a moment of internecine crisis (nah), or Horvath saying "Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful shitty mess" (ugh). Upham as the audience surrogate who needs FUBAR explained to him has a patronizing superficiality, but that's counterbalanced by the simple, moving decency of Pvt. Ryan being told that two men died trying to locate him and having the best possible response: "What were their names?"
In short...well, I already did "in short." A good, deeply flawed film with one all-timer setpiece (that I must have ruled ineligible for Best Scene in the Skandies, due to its length; "Struggle with a knife; Upham on the stairs" placed 5th, in a tie with Buffalo '66's "Heart of the Sunrise" bit. Ryan itself came in at #8, if you're wondering, one notch below, yes, Shakespeare in Love). One moment I'd forgotten that now may haunt me for a good long while: Miller and others dug in below a ridge, he keeps grabbing the soldier with the field phone* to convey messages, third time he does this the guy with the phone just rolls over and his entire face is gone. Miller allows himself two seconds to be horrified, then picks up the phone himself.
* Occurred to me for the first time to wonder exactly how field phones worked back then. Found this fascinating 1941 Army short that lays it out.