Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Omaha Beach sequence. Twenty-seven minutes of controlled chaos that still has the power to leave you genuinely shaking. I went back to Saving Private Ryan recently to see whether it held up after all this time, and the honest answer is: almost entirely, yes. From the moment that landing craft ramp drops and the water turns red, Spielberg drags you into something so raw, so unflinchingly brutal, that most modern war films look like sanitised theme park attractions by comparison. It sets a bar in its opening half-hour that very few films in any genre have ever come close to clearing.
The sound design alone deserves its own mention. Every bullet whizz, every mortar blast, every awful wet thud is mixed so precisely that it becomes a physical experience. You feel it in your chest. The camera work matches it, restless and documentary-close, putting you right in the middle of the horror rather than letting you watch it safely from a distance. Spielberg spent decades building his craft on pictures like Duel and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and you can feel all of that accumulated control here, even when the film is at its most deliberately uncontrolled-looking. He knows exactly what he's doing.
Tom Hanks is the anchor the whole thing needs. Captain Miller is weary, quietly moral, and carrying a weight he never quite puts down, and Hanks plays him with a stillness that keeps the film grounded when it could easily tip into sentiment. The ensemble around him is strong across the board, and I'd give particular credit to a young Vin Diesel, who delivers a genuinely affecting turn that probably surprised a lot of people at the time. But the performance that stays with me most is Giovanni Ribisi as the squad's medic. There's a nervous, deeply human vulnerability to everything he does in this film. His injury scene is almost unbearable to watch precisely because Ribisi has made the character feel so real and so fragile. He's an actor who impresses me in practically everything he touches, and this might be his finest hour.
That said, I'll be straight with you: the film isn't flawless, and I think it's worth being honest about that rather than just piling on the reverence. It's a long picture, and the mid-section drags. As the squad moves through the French countryside, pausing for philosophical arguments and a handful of skirmishes that don't quite match the tension of what came before, the pacing loses some of its grip. The moral debates are well-intentioned and I understand why Spielberg wanted them there, but there are moments when your patience gets tested, and the extraordinary propulsion of that opening sequence feels like a distant memory. It pulls the film back from being the absolute, unimpeachable masterpiece it occasionally threatens to become.
But here's the thing: even with that mid-film stumble, Saving Private Ryan remains a towering, essential piece of work. It captures the sheer terror of the Second World War without ever losing sight of the fragile, ordinary humanity caught up inside it. The final act pulls everything back together with a ferocity that earns every minute of what came before. Spielberg forces you to sit with the grief and the futility as much as the heroism, and that honesty is what separates it from so many films that tell similar stories.
Four and a half stars. Watch it loud, watch it on the biggest screen you can manage, and clear your evening afterwards. You'll need it.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 1998 | Watched: 2026-07-30
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