Directed by:
Steven SpielbergScreenplay:
Robert RodatCinematography:
Janusz KaminskiComposer:
John WilliamsCast:
Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Jeremy Davies, Vin Diesel, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, Matt Damon, Dennis Farina, Ted Danson (more)VOD (4)
Plots(1)
Following the Normandy Landings, a group of US soldiers go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action. (official distributor synopsis)
Videos (1)
Reviews (10)
It is certainly not a flawless film, but technically it is so brilliant that I’m happy to forgive all its shortcomings. Steven Spielberg shows us a real war like nobody has before. Tom Hanks is a genius, as well as Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski. For me, the best war film of all time.
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From the first to the last scene, amazingly conceived, every shot engrosses you, to the point where you feel that a bullet might fly towards you at any moment, and the impact is so significant that I can't get it out of my head for a few days after watching it. I only have a slight issue with how enormous and somewhat unnecessarily grandiose it is, that Steven Spielberg doesn't hold back on his desire for epic stories even a bit. But that would be complaining about something I usually praise. I do appreciate, though, how the director, who is often criticized for being family-oriented and kind, can brilliantly turn all these criticisms upside down.
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I remember Irreversible, There Will Be Blood, The Revenant, Children of Men, and Se7en as films that moved me from needing to see a film in terms of its content to being a dusty formalist. This has now also turned me into a bitter poisonous old man swooning at digital semi-animated films with giant resolution and 60 frames, but I won't deny the occasional worry about whether I've just lost my sensitivity over time and simply become cynical. After the last screening of Private Ryan, I can be completely at ease because I didn't blink for 145 minutes (not counting the four terrible scenes that don't take place in Normandy). It's not just about the movement and composition of shots, but also about the material (Kaminski used a chemical to stretch the film windows to desaturate the colors by removing the silver fibers, a method made famous by Khondji in Se7en, by the way) or the acknowledgement and exploitation of technical limitations (fragmentation, the expansiveness of the light sources). All this in angles yet unseen, often giving the impression that the camera was there by mistake. After all, during the opening sequence, many of the actors and extras involved reportedly did not see the camera and crew at all through the smoke, explosions, and pervasive chaos. Not surprisingly, Private Ryan was at the birth of the perception of World War II and is behind the subsequent wave of films, TV shows, and computer games that have attempted to convey that chaos and destruction with a similar intensity to what was achieved here. PS: I recently saw a piece of this film on some modern TV at a friend's house, where the picture is edited to look like it was shot at a higher frame rate, and I nearly kicked the place apart. I'm kinda sad that a lot of people will only see the film in that format anymore.
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Yes, I like war films. Yes, Spielberg's technical processing of the film seems to bring fiction as close as possible to the reality of war. Still, I consider this film to be only slightly above average, because it says nothing about the war as such. It's a nice recruitment drive on the subject of all of us in the army are friends and we love each other, which is nice, but it feels just like the colored drawings on the promotional posters from World War II. I don't believe even a syllable of the story, so the film only gets points with me for the fight sequences (which are truly riveting) and excellent acting performances. I prefer to overlook the agitation subtext...
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My friend told me that during the opening scene of the landing on Omaha Beach, she wanted to run out of the theater, but she was so hypnotized by what was happening on the screen that she stayed seated. This is a film purely for the big screen and good sound, where bullets fly around you and you feel that you are physically there with them, that you are part of the action. The first half hour has become legendary.
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