SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (74)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Jeremy Davies, Matt Damon

The Pitch: During WW2, a platoon is sent behind enemy lines to save the sole surviving son of a Midwestern family.

Theo Sez: Mr. Spielberg's Eye-Popping, Crowd-Pleasing Virtual-Reality Machine ; or, "War Is Hell - But In A Good Way". A tremendous action movie featuring awesome logistics, a visual texture that haunts you for days after (you can almost smell the pungent whiff of sodden earth) and rather absurd pretensions to offering a revisionist look at the War, "showing it like it was" even. In fact, despite the state-of-the-art technique (making for War-as-theme-park, a hyper-detailed, you-are-there recreation with definite appeal for those who thought the sinking of the ship in TITANIC should've been even longer), this is actually about as "real" as something like THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN, brutal but still exciting and basically conventional - a film where our heroes finally band together to do something unequivocally heroic (save a strategically vital bridge from the beastly Hun) ; where the Allies are confused and decimated but still trying desperately to "do the decent thing" while the Nazis are pure, faceless Evil ; where (unlike, say, PLATOON) the tensions in the group can be instantly resolved via a stirring speech ; where even a coward can finally learn that the only good German is a dead German. That said coward - Corporal Upham - has previously been set up as an audience-surrogate (one, like us, who would rather watch than do) makes the film terribly awkward to think about (is it really telling us to forget all those silly liberal ideas about the value of human life?), just as its theme seems to be that there's no place for individuality in wartime, everyone subservient to the Cause (Spielberg turns loss of self into Sacrifice) : it seems to be aiming for the communitarian, everyone-working-together ethic of A WALK IN THE SUN or OBJECTIVE BURMA! - those films made during the War itself - except that it also wants to rub our noses in the ugly hellishness of what everyone is working for, and there's something distasteful about that combination. The high rating isn't a misprint - the middle section especially is magnificent, soldiers on the move, not really knowing what comes next, and there's at least one amazingly nuanced sequence (Upham thinking he's found a kindred spirit in the Captain, unable to see - though we can see - how futile the connection is, how much he still has to learn : the kind of thing one never thought to find in a Hollywood movie) ; in pure cinematic terms this is clearly among the films of the year. You just wish Spielberg would stop trying to attempt seriousness and devote his considerable talents to doing what he does best : maybe even manage to come up with another JAWS.