Cold water fills your boots as you slog your way up the beaches of Normandy and across the bombed out cities in France. The knots twist in your stomach waiting for the landing craft gate to drop. It’s an assault-course of a movie that hurls an audience with rare ferocity into the sights and sounds of war. (Notes by Neil Sinyard. From the beginning to the end, you feel as if you are there. As the danger increases and where acts of humanity will get you killed, the mission’s incongruity (eight men’s lives being risked to save one?) triggers near-mutiny amongst the recruits and the search will culminate in another agonisingly prolonged battle as the trapped men fight for their lives against advancing German soldiers and tanks that grind relentlessly towards them like a nightmare without end. The central plot concerns a mission behind enemy lines, led by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks), to find Private Ryan (Matt Damon) whose three brothers have recently been killed in action and who is to be sent home as an act of compassion. Saving Private Ryan, which was released in the summer of 1998, was the only movie that Steven Spielberg directed up to that point in his career that he. This is warfare deglamourised, red in tooth and claw. Spielberg’s opening reconstruction of the storming of Omaha Beach by American soldiers on D-Day achieves a combat accuracy that makes the sequence almost unwatchable in its unrelieved slaughter.
