Movie Review #4: Saving Private Ryan

Overall: 4/4 Stars
Pros: Great visual style, battle scenes, pretty much everything.
Cons: Musical score.

First off, I'll get the obvious out of the way. This movie was amazingly beautiful to watch. The cinematography was brilliant and the battle scenes were amazing. Yes, the movie was bloody and full of swearing, but that really didn't bother me at all. The movie was amazingly well written, and each and every one of the characters was someone that I could relate to and I was interested in their well-being. Corporal Upham's story in particular was just something that I really felt rooted in across the entire movie.

Now, on to the part of the movie that really impacted me: the emotion. This is truly one of the first movies in a long time to make me cry, and it made me cry a lot. The ending is one of the most powerful endings I have seen in a movie ever, and it just touched me in a way that I didn't think was possible. Also, the battle scenes stirred something in me. I think it would be disrespectful to call them 'cool' or 'awesome', but what they really did is show the true atrocity and brutality of war. The shot in which the one soldier is blown to pieces by a sticky bomb is one particular image that has just stuck with me. Most people called this a bloody movie, but to be honest, it didn't really impact me like I thought it would. I came into the movie expecting a massive bloodbath, but it wasn't really like that, it was more subdued and a lot of little bits of blood to add up to a larger amount of blood total. There were a few moments that were quite gruesome, such as one man picking up his own arm that had just been blown off, or another where a man literally holds his own guts inside his body, but those kinds of moments were far and few between. The main thing thta this movie made me do was reflect. My grandfather served in World War II, and just thinking about that makes me realize what a brave man my grandfather was, and how much honor he really deserves. That was the real success of Saving Private Ryan.

I think right after this I'll write down my thoughts on WWII video games...