"Saving Private Ryan" Review: Spielberg's Magnum Opus

Steven Spielberg beats the dead horse, but Saving Private Ryan still proves the war drama to end all war dramas.

May 14, 2022

On July 24, 1998, seven months after its release, Titanic, James Cameron’s massive romantic epic, was the number three film at the domestic box office. It was a masterclass in visual craftsmanship, a moving ode to traditional melodrama. It was a cultural juggernaut so popular that on that July day, the same day Saving Private Ryan debuted atop the box office, it was still a force.

It is easy to pinpoint the why and how of Titanic’s success: it depicted a landmark event that shocked the world and undermined damaging socio-economic ideals. It was a mostly-untapped technical goldmine pillaged by a world-class visionary artist. It got led by an up-and-coming Oscar-nominated starlet and Hollywood's premier dreamboat. It had the cheese, schmooze, charm, and the song to guarantee it would go on and on and on. The ingredients were all there. But much like a great dish, the pinch of secret seasoning brings it all together. In Titanic’s case, it was editing.

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James Cameron, whose arrogance and self-indulgence were the stuff of legend, humbled himself enough to make an edit, perhaps the most crucial edit in film history.

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It was a scene of the elderly Rose, after telling her long tale of love and tragedy to treasure hunter Brock Lovett, mounting the stern of Keldysh to drop the “Heart of the Ocean” into the North Atlantic. Spotting her, Lovett and her granddaughter rush to the scene, believing Rose is ready to leap to her death just as she was 84 years prior. She exposes the jewel to a shocked Lovett, who tries to reason with her and procure the stone before Rose lectures him on the true meaning of life and convinces him to stop chasing waterfalls. He loosens his grip, and she tosses the diamond into the water.

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Cameron cut it. It was the edit that saved the most popular film in history.

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He reasoned that after nearly three hours of seeing our young lovers through to their tragic destiny, having invested so much into their story, that we would not care for Lovett and his epiphany. He was right.

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Sometimes it is hard for a creator to know what they need to show or cut. What betrays or honors a story? How does one balance respecting their vision with respecting something greater than themselves?‍

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Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s WWII drama about a group of soldiers sent to rescue a young private after his brothers die in combat, finds this balance, except for the two parts of a movie that matter most if a film wishes to strike it: the beginning and the end.

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It opens with a man, tears welling in his eyes, dragging his way to a WWII memorial as his family moves slowly behind. He makes his way to one of the many white crosses in the grass and falls to his knees.

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By the end, we learn he is the titular Private Ryan, visiting the grave of Captain Miller, who led his men to rescue him. His decision to stay and defend the bridge at Ramelle ultimately gets Miller killed, but not before he uses his dying breath to tell Ryan to “earn this.” We return in the final scene to the weepy Ryan, who tearfully asks his wife to confirm he earned the sacrifices that saved him.

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It is a betrayal of the movie down to the title. It is about saving Private Ryan: a bold, courageous, loyal young man so principled he would sooner leave his mother childless than abandon “the only brothers he has left.” He is not some spineless, sappy waterfall seeking validation: this is not the man they saved. Where did the man in Ramelle go?

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He is gone, replaced by an impostor that fits our expectations of a person worn by war and leveled by loss, living his life to earn the deaths of all those who laid down their lives to save him. It is a disingenuous, schmaltzy ending typical of a filmmaker who frequently dishonors his movies by pounding his point home with a sledgehammer.

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It is a shame: from beach to bridge, Saving Private Ryan is, perhaps, the best movie ever made.

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We know it revolutionized the war genre and renewed interest in WWII, sparking the first-person shooter craze that gave birth to Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. We know its desaturated colors and reduced brightness created a sobering visual aura that suffocated sentiment and forced us to come to the movie instead of getting preached to by color and light.

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We know of the opening 24 minutes, where the Americans land at Omaha Beach. For all its replicators and imitators, it is still the preeminent depiction of the Normandy invasion. Men scream as they get set ablaze, cry out for their mothers as they hold in their guts, and fleeting moments of mercy get undermined by a quick bullet to the head. It is a human depiction of something long presented as melodrama: there is no wailing, whining, cowering, or crying. Men vomit. They scatter themselves and abandon plans the second chaos strikes. They are scared, doing what they can and trying not to get killed along the way.

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That humanity makes Saving Private Ryan worth more than all the hammy, overdone war films that came before it. It has a casual relationship with death. Miller does not sit in shock at the caved-in face of a radio operator. The men do not spend their time after the battle commiserating, mourning those they have lost and lamenting all the death yet to come. They speak amongst themselves, sharing stories of home and trading jabs, embracing that their world is matter-of-fact until something reminds them they are very far from home.

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Miller does not stare at Upham, peering into his soul with the tortured gaze of a battle-weary soldier before asking what happens if they die before the pool on him reaches $1,000. He just asks. Reiben does not reflect on the story of a married woman showing him her busty chest. He just tells it. Ryan does not look wistfully into the distance as he recalls the last night he spent with his brothers, where he, Sean, and Peter “save” Dan from a rendezvous with Alice Jardine. He just laughs through it.

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It creates emotion through rapport. Bonds get tested only when a test emerges. It is not until Wade gets killed when the group takes a German machine gun nest that they fracture, doubting Miller’s command and chastising Upham for injecting ethics into revenge. Before that, they only make their way through the French countryside, disputing their mission, arguing if the one is worth the many and what merit there is in their sacrifice.

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We often embrace extremes to claim meaning in the meaningless or allow one perspective to corrupt compelling drama. We often fail to realize that perspective is individual. If one does not experience war, one cannot know war. Those who do know war do so in their minds. What empathy they give is always a generality, the overarching emotions born from enduring the same circumstances. Specifics cannot get resolved by abstractions. It helps to know those who know our suffering, but they cannot fix us because they are not us.

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Thus, we feign realization and sympathy in the face of histrionics, where men descend into madness amidst the lush jungles of Vietnam as though we know the brutality of that reality. We confuse listening to an experience as having experienced it ourselves. We believe understanding an idea means feeling in our own hearts.‍

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Saving Private Ryan understands that we cannot understand. It maximizes our humanity instead of pretending we know more than we do. It knows every story told by veterans comes from men no different from ourselves; war affects them, jades them, and stays with them, but it does not necessarily define them.

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Power is in those things that make people process their experiences instead of becoming consequences of them. Power is in Miller, an ordinary man placed into extraordinary circumstances, discussing the nature of command with Horvath. Power is remembering that what unites us in times of peril are the shared experiences, like pretending to be asleep when our parents tucked us in. We contemplate because the characters contemplate.‍

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Saving Private Ryan attaches us to characters through their commonality instead of isolating traits and ballooning them for effect. It understands the strength of simple things. It understands wanting to protect your friends. It understands doing what you have to do to return your loved ones. Within this understanding, moments that would otherwise be typical ring true.

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Wade’s death doesn’t hurt because the film kills the group’s moral compass but because his morality feels sincere. He sees things we tell ourselves we would see and act upon but likely wouldn’t in reality. He sees the group treating the dog tags like poker chips as the Airborne walks by and calls them out. He cannot stop being a doctor long enough to see the bigger picture and safeguard his own life.

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Ryan’s choice is not that of a young fool trying to prove some sense of honor. These men have to do the best they can as the people that they are. Ryan cannot abandon the bridge just like Reiben cannot help but yell out that they have lost friends looking for him. Miller cannot tell Ryan he isn’t interested in his story, though it’s clear what is amusing to a young man is not as funny to an older one. Horvath cannot help but stay loyal to his captain and reflect on what it means to save Private Ryan. In the end, these men came into the war as who they are and will leave it just the same. Nothing can truly change us, only what we must resolve to find that person again.

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Thus, we ponder what Saving Private Ryan could have been if it’d ended on the bridge, as James looks down at a dead Captain Miller, reflecting on the dying words that will come to define his life.

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He is young but is self-assured. He trusts in the truth of his choices and fights for what he believes in. His virtue is enough to "earn it." He is enough to earn it. As long as we understand that and hold on to it, we all are. Saving Private Ryan understands that until old Ryan, much like old Rose, has an opportunity to make or break the movie. With a quick Cameron-like edit, we would know it still realizes what earning sacrifice truly means. But in the end, where Old Rose tosses the diamond as Brock contemplates his life, old Ryan betrays everything he was and stood for, and thus everything the movie was and stood for.

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We cannot know if Ryan “earned it,” or what that would entail. We did not follow him for the last 54 years to see his choices and what person he became. We cannot trust that he followed some course worthy of the sacrifices made for him because the person he is at the gravesite is such a far cry from the person on the bridge, so much that he’s unrecognizable in character. We cannot earn because others tell us we did. His wife does not know the nature of that moment between him and Miller or what it means to have “earned it.” She can only give that blind validation all spouses give each other, often born from affection instead of truth.

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Her quick-fire assuaging of his doubts is so reactive it’s clear she doesn’t even know of that moment at all. Not only did that bold, willful man on the bridge become someone contradictory to who he was, but in getting validated by a stranger to the moment for something we must validate ourselves, he fails to have earned it. Worst of all, we know he fails so that a director can lay on the weepiness so thick we can barely see that last, lingering shot of the American flag.‍

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Saving Private Ryan is still a film for the ages, and one that understands humanity better than many movies ever have or ever will: but you have to skip the beginning and the end to see it.