When it was announced that Steven Spielberg was planning a large-scale World War 2 movie centering around the D-Day landings, everybody knew something epic was on the horizon. After all, you didn't have to be a historian or expert in warfare to know that the Allied landings at Normandy featured some of the most spectacularly bloody fighting in the entire war. And boy did Spielberg deliver - at least, to a degree. Few scenes in movie history are as raw and visceral as the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan. Every aspect of the filmmaking process is handled to perfection, from the gut-wrenching sound design as bullets fly in every direction and tear through flesh (no music from John Williams to remind the audience that this is a movie), to the ingenious cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, lens streaked with the blinding flashes of artillery blasts, and of course the incredible performances from an exemplary cast and a literal army of extras. It is with good reason that many people consider it to be the best battle scene of all time. Which is both a noble achievement and also a difficult one to top, and the rest of Saving Private Ryan doesn't to come close to the same level of intensity and edge-of-your-seat involvement. Indeed, much as people might be loathe to admit it, the film is a comparatively run-of- the-mill movie which, in terms of war films in general, serves up a number of familiar cliches throughout, not least the over-simplification of "good" Allies versus "evil" Germans, as if war is quite so one-sided as, well, a Hollywood movie. Perhaps if a director like Stanley Kubrick had taken the helm after the first 30 minutes, Saving Private Ryan would have been a genuine, thought-provoking masterpiece.
