re: #26 BigPapa

As I posted this morning. Saving Private Ryan is my favorite movie. I’ll never watch it again. War is the most serious business and the most horrible choice to ever be made.

The first 20-25ish minutes or so (the Omaha Beach sequence) is absolutely a gutpunch; Spielberg did a lot of the on-beach camerawork himself handheld. That section of the film is absolutely a technical masterclass; however, the rest of the movie devolves into trite, formulaic war film much like those about WWII released during and after the war.

It’s not a horrible film, but the middle and end let the beginning down so hard; if Speilberg had made a film just about the D-Day invasion, doing everything he did with the Omaha Beach sequence, it’d been hailed a critical classic, instead of just the popular “crowdpleaser” it ended up being..