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Why I Hate Saving Private Ryan
I am a bit of a connoisseur of war movies. I spent a large part of my youth staying up late on Saturday nights watching all the classic World War II movies on broadcast television. Being a fan of war movies, one would think that I was also a fan of Saving Private Ryan. Saving Private Ryan is considered many the gold standard by which all war movies that have come after are to be judged. I, however, disagree and more so as time goes on.
Understand upfront that Saving Private Ryan has many redeeming features. The initial scene of the storming of Normandy beach is a masterpiece of filmmaking. It is one of those scenes that makes Hollywood great and makes you stand in awe of what a genius Steven Spielberg really is.
The acting in the movie is also very good. And much the dialog is well written. Saving Private Ryan in many ways should be the classic that it is considered by many to be. The movie ultimately fails because of fundamental flaws in the plot and overall message of the movie that cannot be overcome by the many virtues of the film’s directing and acting.
Ironically for a film famous for its realism, all of Saving Private Ryan’s flaws relate in some way to realism. Despite all of the realistic filming and action, the movie fails to portray war and armies in a realistic way. Some of the flaws could be forgiven in a movie that made fewer pretensions about realism. They are unforgivable in a film that claims realism to be one of its prime virtues. And Private Ryan’s overall message about the nature of war cannot be forgiven in any movie.
After the initial storming of Normandy beach, which other than involving Tom Hanks really has no connection to the rest of the plot, the movie rests on an absurdly unrealistic premise; that General Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the Army, would take the time to order a special mission to find the last surviving son of a grieving mother. The US was losing around a thousand lives a day in June of 1944. Yes, there was a soul surviving son rule. And yes, being the last surviving son was a ticket home. But no way on earth would a staff officer at the Pentagon much less the Chief of Staff, taken the time to stop everything and send a mission to find such a son. There were lots of such sons and more important things to do than find them immediately, much less use valuable assets like Rangers to do so.
After getting the mission, Hanks and crew are somehow able to saunter off into the hedgerows of Normandy for a good days hike. The US 1st and 29th and the German 352nd Infantry Divisions were in death struggle in front of Omaha Beach in June of 1945. There was a continuous line of contact between Allied and German units. If it were possible could just walk out and link up with the 101st Airborne, they would have done that and the battle would have turned into a mop up operation. Yet, somehow Hanks and company wander about Normandy with impunity.
Then there is the storming of the German bunker. This is, without doubt, one of the most annoyingly unrealistic and contrived scenes in movie history. The entire scene is nothing but a transparent excuse to have the German prisoner scene that follows, which has its own problems which I will get to in a moment. The movie never explains why there would be this lonely German machine gun nest totally isolated from the rest of the German army. The Germans, the people who more or less invented modern warfare, somehow just decided to put a machine gun nest totally isolated for no apparent reason or advantage. And didn’t bother to camouflage it at all. And the men manning it don’t notice Hanks and crew approaching even though Hanks spots them. No, they were just sitting out there with a big “we are here to create a moral dilemma scene and kill off a beloved character” sign.
And of course, Hanks decides to attack it for no apparent reason. The idea that he could report its position and actually accomplish something useful during this mission never occurs to him. No, according to Hanks, his entire team must risk their lives to take out a single, isolated machine gun nest because “someone else my come along and have to do it if we don’t’. Well, sure they will. Someone else with air support and maybe artillery and better ways of doing it than charging over open ground in broad daylight.
Once Hanks decides that the machine gun nest must be eliminated for the greater good, he attacks it in the dumbest way possible. Hanks has this incredible sniper on his team. He knows where the machine gun nest is. It is pretty out in the open. Hey, why not let the 1940s Carlos Hathcock over here take a shot at killing a few of the people manning the bunker before we charge out there? Hey how about we wait until nightfall when we might have a chance of getting close to it before they see us? Nope. Hanks, against the entire collective wisdom and doctrine of modern infantry, decides that the position must be taken in daylight, without any element of surprise, and by frontal assault over open ground. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that Captain Hanks would not have been very beloved by his men. The whole scene is absurd and infuriating, especially when occurring in the “most realistic war movie ever” as Saving Private Ryan is sometimes called.
Then there is the German prisoner scene that follows. This scene is by far the worst of the movie. It is totally contrived and unrealistic. The scene only exists at all because of the ridiculous existence and attack on the German machine gun nest. Moreover, even if those events had occurred, there would have never been any prisoners or moral dilemmas. And that is not because American soldiers made a habit of shooting German prisoners. They didn’t. It would never have occurred because while soldiers do not shoot prisoners they also don’t always go out of their way to allow the enemy the opportunity to surrender or judge other soldiers’ split second decisions in combat. Everyone in Hanks’ team would have known they had no way to take and hold a prisoner. And when they took that bunker, they would have killed everyone inside it before they ever had a chance to surrender or quickly enough they could plausibly say they didn’t realize that before they shot them and that would have been it. Oh, that guy had his hands up? I didn’t see that. What they would never have done was capture some poor guy and then sit around for 30 minutes arguing about whether to shoot him.
And the ensuing argument is some of the worst dialog ever put to film. Why can’t we just take his rifle and leave him behind? Because he might hurt someone. Yeah because one disarmed German private wondering around in the middle of the Battle of Normandy is going to do so much damage. Every time I watch that scene I want to jump through the screen and grab a rifle and shoot the poor German just so the rest of them will shut up and get on with the rest of the movie.
The most unrealistic aspect of Saving Private Ryan and what makes it so irredeemably awful despite the virtues of the direction and acting is how it portrays war in general. The premise of the movie is as I explained above absurd. But an absurd premise doesn’t necessarily mean a movie is bad. The Dirty Dozen is a classic war movie and is based on the absurd premise that the Army would use death row inmates to carry out a vital mission on D-Day. The deeper problem with Saving Private Ryan is that embraces a mawkish and unrealistic view of war in general.
The remarkable thing about the mission in Saving Private Ryan is that it does nothing to help the Allied cause or end the war. The mission and all of that sacrifice is to get some Private back home with his mother. Of course, that is supposed to be a metaphor. The men of D-Day didn’t just save Private Ryan, they saved all of us. Okay, but how? By charging around Normandy trying to send some guy home to his mom? I don’t think so.
The men who fought and died in Normandy did save us from fascism. I have no doubt about that. They didn’t do that by saving people and sending them home to their mothers. They did it by murdering Germans until the Germans had no more will to fight and surrendered. And that is what war is about; killing. It isn’t about saving people or doing good deeds. It is about the grim job of killing people until the other side gets sick of dying and gives up. And that is what I loathe most about Saving Private Ryan; that it enforces the fantasy idea that war is about noble sacrifice and not about killing.
This country suffers from the cult of the wounded warrior. At some point, we stopped understanding what war is about killing and winning and celebrating people who did heroic acts in furtherance of that and started to think war is about dying and sacrifice and started only celebrating those unfortunates who make such sacrifices. This is not to say that the people killed or wounded in war are not making the ultimate sacrifice and worthy of honor. They are. But getting wounded or killed is not what war is about and not what ends wars or more importantly wins wars. What ends wars and wins wars is killing.
And forgetting that is a very bad thing. Thinking war is really about sacrifice and positive actions like saving people cause us to lose sight of the enormous moral gravity of the decision to go to war. We don’t send men and women to war to save Private Ryan. We send them there to kill people. And if we are not comfortable with the full meaning of that, we shouldn’t do it. Ignoring that reality and pretending war is about the positive, causes us to enter into wars far too cavalierly and without a full understanding of the moral consequences of doing so.
Worse still, having a fantasy view that war is about sacrifice and saving people rather than killing, makes us less likely to stay with a war until it is won. Time and again people support going to war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan only to turn against the war once it gets hard or they see full extent of the horror our military necessarily inflicts on its adversaries. If we understood war was about killing, we would be less likely to go to war and more likely to finish and win wars when we did.
The entire point of Saving Private Ryan is as the title says, to save someone not win or even shorten the war. And what a pointless mission it is. Yeah, it’s nice that Matt Damon gets to go home. But thousands of other people were not going home ever. And if you are going to be one of them, you would like to think you died so the war would end sooner not so some guy can go home to mom. I think if the Tom Hanks character were real and you could tell him on June 5th that he was destined to die in Normandy, he would be sad but understand because that was a risk he signed up to take. If you told him he would die not trying to win the war but instead doing some errand for Headquarters trying to ensure that some private got to go home, he probably wouldn’t be too happy about that. Sure, he died after staying on to defend the bridge, but the only reason he was there was to retrieve Ryan. And that had nothing to do with winning the war.
In fact, winning the war is something none of the characters in the movie seem to consider. The entire movie can be summed up as follow. Sure, Mrs. Ryan, I will put down my duties as Chief of Staff of the Army to make sure your son returns. Sure, Mrs. Ryan, we will take a highly trained team of infantry that could be doing other valuable things and send them off on a snipe hunt looking for your son. Why? Because what matters is the individual and doing good deeds. Winning the war as quickly as possible so we can go home and not have any more mothers with dead sons in Europe, well that is just something that will take care of itself. We are all about saving your son Mrs. Ryan.
And that sums up the problems with 21st Century America in many ways. We have stopped facing reality as it is and making the tough choices and sacrifices necessary for our civilization. We pretend that life revolves around us and there are no larger issues at play and that we will always be able to make the noble and easy choice. And that conceit is at the heart of Saving Private Ryan and why I am more convinced it is a lousy movie today than I was the day I first saw it.
Published in General
I can’t sign on to this appraisal of the movie. The appraisal is fine on it’s technical merits, and correct, for sure. But the movie really isn’t about that, not for me. It’s about the final scene, when the now old James Francis Ryan comes to pay his respects to the men he served with. As a soldier, I deeply feel the emotion in that scene. “Am I a good man?” He’s really asking “Have I earned it? Did I do what it takes? Why did I come back and they didn’t?” And I think it is a feeling every soldier feels.
You are right, there are a lot of things you can pick apart. And the movie isn’t something I watch over and over. But I still consider it a good movie about what it means to be a solider.
Now, if you want to watch a really bad movie, watch Fury.
I can forgive most of these flaws because they are necessary for the characters and the story as a whole.
What I can’t forgive is Matt Damon’s awkward improv scene and his inability to convincingly fake a laugh. Were those the best takes, really?
Matt Damon is the worst part of the movie.
I’ve always loved Tom Sizemore, though. It’s too bad he made such a mess of his personal life.
By the way, you left out the actual worst scene, which was the whole Caparzo gets the french girl down from the blown out building nonsense. Just so we could have an excuse to watch him die in the rain.
No war movie worth its salt should ever use the cutesy title form of “Gerund (Proper) Noun”. It makes one think of “Boxing Helena” or “Driving Miss Daisy” or “Chasing Amy” or “Being Julia”, etc., etc.
War movies have swaggering titles such as, “Where Eagles Dare” or “The Guns of Navarone” or “The Dirty Dozen” or “Paths of Glory”.
McSweeney’s once provided a list of “ungerunded” movie titles. One was “I Drove That Old B**** Miss Daisy”. Another was “Helena Is In A Box And We Made This Piece Of [CoC] Movie About It”. And, of course, there was “Ryan Saved Privately”.
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” – Robert E. Lee
I like it but can we even quote that guy now? (-;
Don’t forget the ever-popular Shaving Ryan’s Privates.
In the mid-80s I worked in a video rental store that included a porn section (excuse me, adult section). I always loved the puns and bad rename takeoffs the movies would come up with to riff off of more mainstreams titles. Goo Morning Vietnam comes to mind…
I haven’t seen SPR since it was in theaters, but I don’t see a connection here. Those movies are about mercenaries hired to protect villages from bandits.
Maybe he’s confusing it with Three Amigos.
Elsewhere here I’ve noted office comedy “8 to 4” (“for those who like to get in early”), “Flesh Gordon”, and “The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio–It’s Not His Nose that Grows!”
I’ll admit to having never seen SPR, but it was one that I had on my list of “I should see that someday.” Now I know I can safely take it off the list. (It’s a long enough list anyway.)
You do make one point that I think deserves some discussion. (Actually there are several points, but there is a word limit here.)
I get what you’re saying about how movies that focus on the honorable and individual actions that happen during a war instead of the war itself set unrealistic expectations. I even agree with that. But what movie doesn’t set unrealistic expectations? Movies aren’t supposed to be realistic. Romances in real life aren’t like The Notebook* or Deadpool**. Being a Navy pilot isn’t anything like Top Gun. Life as a super rich orphan is nothing like Batman. A truly realistic movie about war wouldn’t be enjoyable at all. (It would probably leave some measurable percentage of the audience with PTSD.) War is, as the Lee quote in the comment above reminds us, terrible. But within that horror there is the opportunity for noble sacrifice and heroism. That contrast is what makes war movies compelling. Is focusing on just that a fantasy? Sure. But that’s why people watch movies.
Would it be better if everyone really, truly understood war? That’s debatable. You make some very good points about the cost of civilians not understanding it, but I think one of the blessings of our society today is that a good chunk of the population can and does remain blissfully ignorant. Now many might be more ignorant than I’d like, but I’d rather that than have everyone know first-hand what war is really like. There’s a happy medium in there somewhere.
*Another movie I’ve never seen, although my wife keeps threatening to make me watch it.
**The reason she threatens me.
I don’t think you should. I don’t necessarily agree with the criticisms in the OP, but I don’t think they’re fatal. And regardless of what you think of the rest of the movie, the opening sequence is stunning.
Hanks was actually the Executive Producer on Band of Brothers. My (highly unlikely) theory is that he treated it as a makeup for the nonsense that SPR was once they got off the beach. I mean, could you imagine Captain Winters of BOB tolerating that kind of insane bar room argument over the prisoner from Malarky or Powers? Could you imagine Malarkey or Powers offering that argument? Gah!!
Last beef with SPR (and most war movies). How OLD are these guys? At the time, Hanks was 44 years old playing this captain. Ted Danson was 53 playing Captain Hammill. Paul Giamatti was 33 years old, and puffy playing Sgt Hill. Dennis Farina- Dennis Ferina for pete’s sake! was 56 years old when he played Lt. Col. Anderson. The vast majority of these guys were 18, 19, 20. 22 was an “old man.” Even Matt Damon, playing young Private Ryan, was 30 at the time.
My theory about these casting choices is that somehow gritty, adult Tom Hanks is a much more comfortable visual for audiences than actual 19 and 20 year olds. Too bad.
To be fair, it’s almost always been like that. Movies that came out during and just after WWII had actors much older than average GIs. On the other hand, in WWII that draft ran to ages much higher than it would, say, fifty or sixty years ago.
In the category of “movies that everyone except me seems to love”, I would include “Dead Poets Society”. The painfully trite scene where Robin Williams has the students stand on their desks to get a different perspective on the world (had they never changed a light bulb?) is but one reason to despise the film.
Nope. The median age of American soldiers in WW2 was about 26, if I recall correctly.
My dad ended his teenagerhood by spending his 20th birthday in a hospital in France, after having been hit by shrapnel from a German mortar. A heck of a way to celebrate that milestone.
If the wind direction had been, let’s say, one degree different, perhaps I wouldn’t be here to write this.
Get off my lawn, McVey!! :)
You are correct. It’s really an industry wide problem- 25 year olds playing high school juniors, 12 year olds playing 8, etc. But for a movie with so much “realism” it seems a big boat to have missed. Which is again why BOB and Blackhawk down stand out to me. (23 year old Josh Hartnet playing a Sgt in the 10th Mountain division, 33 year old Eric Bana playing a Delta Force operator. 30 year old Damien Lewis playing Lt and later Captain Winters. Just worked better for me.
My mother-in-law loves movies and talking with me about them, but I think she is starting to be wary of my reviews of war movies.
She nearly fell over when I told her how much I hated “Hacksaw Ridge.”
One, the battle scenes were just stupid. I just can’t believe any battle would be fought like that. There was not even an attempt at tactics or planning or anything. They just stood up in the face of entrenched machine guns and blindly shot until they were cut down. That is probably only going to be done for the first 30 seconds of a green outfit.
But the biggest problem I had was with the entire premise of the film. I hate that guy. I hate him with all my guts. Who the hell does he think he is to be a conscientious objector and still join an infantry outfit? Why would anyone admire him? So he saved a bunch of people. Yippee. He’s not completely with the whale excrement. But he’s still close.
I have no respect for a boy (he’s not a man) who thinks that he’s so special that he can’t hurt the enemy.
But, that’s a topic for another day. The portrayal of the military in that movie was retarded, both in garrison and in battle.
I don’t know why movie makers think people are too stupid to respond to how the military really is. Band of Brothers probably comes closest in my recollection. Very few others even try to show the real story of human interactions, and the bravery that is so common among people fighting for their lives and, more importantly, fighting to kill the enemy.
And I think that last distinction is the big reason why the movies are so bad. They don’t lionize heroic men. They laud the conscientious objector. They honor the medic. They make the movie about the sniveling linguist. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut, may he suffer in hell. In his book “Slaughterhouse 5”, the heroic men are morons, and the shirker is the wise man.
My war involvement was in Iraq, and I’ll never compare it to the Battle of the Bulge, but I only saw Marines who never shirked, never stood around in a catatonic daze, and who jumped in to fight and kill and win. That’s what I want in a war movie, a reminder of how good men at war are and how bravely they fight. I want our culture to again think that men are good and strong, and not cowards.
“Saving Private Ryan” was not the worst of the genre in that regard, but it still portrays many of the soldiers in a way that I would consider unrealistically unmanly.
I think that’s all soldiers in the war effort. The guys who stormed the beaches of Normandy were younger, simply based on the required physical conditioning. I don’t have the stat in front of me, but my understanding was the average age was about 20.
One scene that really bothered me was when the German stabbed the Jewish soldier and was face-to-face with him, cooing, “Shhhhh,” in a soothing manner. It was creepy, and effective, I suppose, in portraying the German as a psychopath, but I can’t imagine such a thing ever happening in the war.
Did you ever see Grease? I think Stockard Channing was in her mid-30s when they filmed it. I know she’s in her 70s now.
I agree with your take on the movie and I would add another problem I have always had with it… the scene where the Hanks character is quietly talking with his men and says, “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, ***** mess.”
I know soldiers love to gripe, but no WW II soldier would have said this… this is Spielberg’s voice, informed by his views on war which were shaped by Vietnam.
“One decent thing?’… whatever their gripes about a given mission, I am quite certain that every soldier of that era understood that rescuing Europe from nazi tyranny was already “the “one good thing” they were accomplishing.
I was moved when watching SPR. There were some wonderful scenes. But as a whole, it was stylized and the men too often reflected a modern nihilism. Men of that age were not jaded nihilists; they were innocent, eager, naive and driven by duty and dedication to their mates. Stll, there were great moments; unfortunately they were often ruined by heavy handed attempts to linger and stylize horror. BoB was better because it was true to the material and less apt to stylize. Pacific could have been as good as BoB except that the producers could not help themselves but linger over the gore; not to the extent of SPR, but more than BoB. I also think the Pacific failed to show the stoicism of the men in the Pacific. Most men were not broken by the war, yet all three of the main characters in the Pacific were, to some degree, ruined at the end of the series. Again, I think this was an exaggeration, a political statement generally. I’ve not read the underlying books, but I’ll bet the authors stressed courage and heroics over PTSD.
SPR is a one trick pony. Like the Deerhunter, it is an anti war film where the cause is irrelevant. Neither is worth a second viewing.
That was the obligatory barely veiled homoerotic scene.
Nevermind…read the whole comment Owsley!
Hacksaw Ridge, like Fury, was a comic book made in to a movie.
I agree with all of it, with one minor quibble: G.I.s did not “murder” Germans in battle, they killed them. There’s a moral distinction to be made.
Well, it was a comedy… that was part of the fun, no? I mean, who could believe Sid Caesar as the track coach?