Saving Private Ryan (1998)

"He who saves one life, saves the world ". This was the slogan of Schindler's List which shook the depths of viewers' souls all over the world in 1993. The film about the Jew massacre in Germany of ΄40s won the first Oscar for Steven Spielberg. Maestro has shot a great number of good movies of diverse genres - The Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and many others. But the only two movies of his brilliant employment sheet awarded with the golden statuettes are by a strange coincidence about the dramatic events of the World War II.

Saving Private Ryan is another Spielberg's masterpiece released in 1998. It takes place among the best action films ever shot and possesses an impressive list of achievements: 5 Academy Awards, 2 Golden Globes, high rankings in the best drama movies top lists, immense total gross and numerous praises from critics. However, this is just a bare listing of facts, apart from which there were thousands of people leaving cinema halls in sincere tears and with deep sense of pride for their nation, and one of the strongest and most recognizable battle scenes in the history of cinema.

This realistic war drama is based on the events of the World War II. June of 1944. American troops are landing in Normandy. The very first minutes on French territory turn out a bloody carnage. This combat scene is depicted with the most merciless naturalism, which shocks and impresses at once. At the same time, in the United States, thousand miles away from the battlefield, General George Marshall orders to find and save at any cost Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), the only survivor of the four Ryan brothers, whose poor mother got 3 "killed in battle" notices within one day. Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) is charged with the mission. He forms a group of 7 soldiers and officers and starts the dangerous search of the Private lost somewhere in the depths of the unfriendly foreign country. Miller knows that they are looking for a needle in a haystack, and that Private Ryan could have been dead already, but his duty calls him to risk his life and the lives of his people to save the young man.

Acting is one of the strongest aspects of the movie. Young Matt Damon first showed himself as a strong dramatic actor, while Tom Hanks proved his ability to perform anyone from simple-hearted Forrest Gump and charming Sheriff Woody (Toy Story) to a war hero.

Many critics state that the only disadvantage of the movie is the high predictability of the plot. From the very beginning it's easy to guess that Private Ryan will be found and saved at the cost of many lives. But on the other hand, Spielberg could have done that on purpose: the way the plot revolves intensifies the film's tragic mood, making it piercingly fatalistic. Saving Private Ryan is not a movie about several soldiers' tragic deaths, but about the greatest tragedy in history, the tragedy of a generation crippled physically and mentally by the war. Miller and his people perish heroically for the sake of a young boy unknown to them. Private Ryan, a loyal and brave soldier, not guilty of anything, by a cruel joke of fate becomes the reason for many deaths. He is doomed to a long life with this regret and sense of guilt. The director has made deep parallels between Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. Actually these two masterpieces are bearing the same philosophic idea. The slogan «He who saves one life, saves the world» is also a key to Saving Private Ryan.