Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan

Watched on Blu-Ray

It's starting.
The landing in Normandy.
The troops are ready.
We are ready.
They face their fate.
They will all fight, hopeless as it may seem.
Some will survive, some will fall.
War has no mercy.
It always has been, it always will be.

The opening sequence in "Saving Private Ryan" is one of the most haunting cinematic moments of all time. With goose bumps all over the body the viewer follows the events of D-Day and the intensity of what is shown is hard to beat. Staging-wise, Spielberg probably does everything right in this case and for this reason, too, makes us tremble with sweaty hands for the survival of the Allies.

Would this have resulted in a short film which ends after the shot of the blood-soaked sea - yes, I would play with the idea of awarding the highest score. Unfortunately, "Saving Private Ryan" is not a short film, but rather the exact opposite: an epic 170-minute work, which can't or won't use its mercilessly effective initial conditions of these first half hours any more. So instead of continuing to rely on these principles, Spielberg's Oscar-winning film loses itself further and further in a trivial plot, which is never to reach the size of this first part again - the impact on the ground is therefore not entirely painless, because I had thrown all my fears to the wind and didn't want to believe that there would be such a drop in performance - I was unfortunately taught a better lesson.

Apart from that the movie commits at least one more serious mistake in the further course of the film, which makes me reject the masterpiece status quite clearly: the conceptual break and the pathos-charged and patriotic portrayal that goes along with it. Through this the viewer is presented with an ambivalent film experience, which consequently has to "fail" due to the inconsistency and consequently robs itself of its own strength, which was so meticulously built up during the landing in Normandy.

However, Spielberg doesn't deliver a bad movie by far, as he knows his craft too well for that and always knows how to create moments that pull the viewer back into the boat in order to bring back the soldier James Ryan alive. In the end, this boat will arrive safely on shore, but because of the losses that were suffered, it somehow only feels like a conditioned victory for the viewer in the end.

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