5. Saving Private Ryan
Saving Private Ryan manages to contain both the best and worst of Steven Spielberg. While it is a work of astonishing technical accomplishment, Saving Private Ryan doesn't quite reach its potential because of Spielberg's insistence on making several key scenes overly sentimental where understatement probably would have been more effective. Nevertheless, as a whole, Saving Private Ryan remains one of the towering works in the war film genre. Saving Private Ryan follows a group of soldiers who are tasked with recovering a Private James Ryan, who is missing in action. Ryan is the last of four brothers who have fought in the war and it is decided that recovering him would be good for morale on the homefront. A group of soldiers headed by Captain Miller is assembled to find him and much of the movie deals with their search and with the group wondering why eight lives are being risked for the sake of one. Even the harshest critics of Spielberg have nothing to complain about for the first 27 minutes of the film as Spielberg puts together one of the most riveting scenes in movie history. As allied forces storm the beach at Normandy, the camera focuses on the chaos of the battlefield and does not attempt to make any sense of the action. The result is a tour-de force of filmmaking that the rest of the movie never reaches although the final battle is nearly as visceral but smaller in scope. Spielberg does not skimp on attention to detail and this film might contain the most realistic reproduction of battle scenes of any movie on this list. The actors are chosen against type, the characters they play are not action heroes, they are regular people with normal lives as most of the soldiers would have been in real life. Saving Private Ryan's realism is one of the reasons it seems to be a favorite of military veterans, who connect with it in a way that other, more stylized war films, often fail to do. Saving Private Ryan is as philosophical a film as Spielberg has ever made and it is told in a series of astonishing images that few filmmakers would even dare to attempt. However I can't shake the feeling that with just a few small changes here and there to make the film a bit more subtle and it could have challenged for number one on the list. Regardless, Saving Private Ryan is one of the best war movies ever made and no modern war film has captured the imagination of the general public, or impacted succeeding war films, more thoroughly than it has.