Saving Private Ryan: Images of War

Saving Private Ryan begins and ends with two long, extended battle sequences.  These scenes are shot hand-held with little dialogue and they have the feel of on-location documentary footage.  Because Private Ryan is a Spielberg film, and because it has that Spielberg style that feels good-hearted and hopeful even in the midst of war, I think people tend to forget how real and raw these scenes are.  One of the most brutal and violent depictions I've ever seen.  Kubrick may have had the more dark and calculating reputation, but shot for shot, there's really nothing in Full Metal Jacket that comes close to what you see here.

But it's not just violence for the sake of violence.  The two separate scenes and the feeling their images invoke serve as milestones that gauge the evolution worked in the audience's mind through-out the film.  The first scene depicts the D-Day landing at Normandy.  The shots are fast and low, and they give you an uncanny, unnerving feeling or being right there with the soldiers.  You feel you're experiencing the battle with them, and the one thought that goes through you mind, the same thought that must have gone through so many of their minds, is  simply that you don't want to die.  Beneath the withering fire of the German guns the whole point and purpose of the battle and all other considerations are pushed aside.  Life is torn to pieces all around you, and you just don't want to die.  Nothing else matters.  Then, the movie closes with another epic battle scene, as the characters fight to defend a bridge where the German army plans to cross.  Again, it's a harsh and violent scene, and again you feel like you're down in the middle of it with the characters, but yet somehow the fear of the opening scene is gone.  Death is still there at every turn, and a character is even show paralyzed into inaction by his own fear, but that feeling of stark and intense mortality that drives every other thought from the mind is gone, replaced by a feeling of nobler purpose.  It is the deceptively simple story that takes place between these two scenes that causes the change.

So what is this nobler purpose?  The movie barely touches on the political agendas and moral issues behind the war itself.  The subject of the holocaust is raised through a Jewish member of the squad that goes searching for Private Ryan, but this is more a matter of characterization than theme.  The German soldiers aren't cast as villains, and in fact, there is one scene where we can't help but feel sympathy for one of them.  So this "nobler purpose" isn't just a matter of good fighting in a righteous cause against evil.  The feeling is more like men put into an unfortunate situation where they're forced to kill one another.  In the heat of battle they're driven to a murderous rage because the enemy is trying to kill them even though they're also trying to kill the enemy in turn.  The absurdity of this is demonstrated clearly in one scene in particular.  The saying, "If God be for us, who could be against us?", is even raised in a conversation between the men, but it's clearly not where the movie's heart lies.  This is just the soldiers trying to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. 

No, the nobler purpose is to be found in their mission to find Ryan.  "This time, the mission is a man.", one of the soldiers observes.  It's the fact that even in the middle of a war, with men dying all around, one individual human life still has value.  It ultimately doesn't matter whether Ryan goes home and "invents a longer lasting light bulb."  What matters is that a human life was saved.  The importance of this comes to be something that goes beyond the "math" of the mission and even the senselessness of war itself.  One single man's life still has value.   

In the end, they stay to defend the bridge.  Not because the Germans are evil and have to be stopped.  They stay because Ryan doesn't want to abandon "the only brothers he has left."  They stay, because they stay together.  So when that final battle comes, it's no longer just a case of men thrown senselessly into the face of mortality.  It's men who have chosen to fight and even die to try to keep each other alive.  They've learned that isn't a question of nine men sacrificed to save one, or one sacrificed to save nine.  It's life that matters, regardless of the numbers.