This film is framed by a couple of scenes with no other purpose than tomake sure the audience full of idiots gets the significance of the big,
long story in the middle, wherein a small squad of soldiers led by Capt.
John Miller (Tom Hanks) is ordered behind enemy lines to find and retrieve
one man: Private James Ryan (Matt Damon). In the beginning, an old guy goes
to a cemetery and starts to cry. In the end, the same old guy talks to his
dead pals from long ago and gives a nice speech. Maybe Spielberg could have
hired people to come into the theater and drop actual concussion grenades -- it
would have been about as subtle.
This is a very small story in a very big war and as such, Spielberg
has utterly depoliticized the entire thing, which is probably okay except
that it means listening to Neanderthals root for people to be shot in the
face and utter "cool" and "neato" when people's limbs fly across the screen
as Spielberg sets new standards for cinematic war realism.
Miller's squad consists of your typical supporting character types
(Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Jeremy Davies,
Tom Sizemore and Edward Burns), which means that if you list them in order
from least well known to most well known, you've also just listed the order
in which they are knocked off in the story. Thus, we can go through the
entire movie pretty sure that Forrest Gump and Good Will Hunting are going
to run into each other at some point and discuss the finer points of
advanced math or chocolates or war morality.
One of the things the old guy also does at the end is salute the
gravestone he's talking to, which was something I saw coming from so far
away that I had time to step aside and write a short treatise on free
will as it relates to independent thought before stepping back in
harm's way and being smacked in the kisser by the runaway freight train
that is Spielbergian manipulation at its finest.
