Jeremy’s Tophunder №9: Saving Private Ryan
For the first 30-odd years of Stephen Spielberg’s career, he was known for (among other things) his visual clarity. Above all else, every shot and every scene needed to make sense visually. He rarely shot on handheld cameras unless it was just more efficient to do so. The action stayed in the shot, and the camera was always in the right place.
Then he did Saving Private Ryan.
The Omaha Beach scene that opens Saving Private Ryan is 24 minutes long. And it’s chaos. Absolute chaos.
If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to embed it below. Be warned, the images at times are very graphic.
Throughout the scene, there are many shots of the camera looking at (seemingly) nothing in particular besides troops on the beach.
This was not a coincidence. Spielberg famously did not storyboard the opening sequence. He opted instead to let the camera find the action. He also intentionally included those shots to bring the audience onto the beach with the soldiers. The camera doesn’t know where to look because the soldiers don’t either.
Much of the scene (and indeed, much of the movie) uses a softer and duller focus, with muted colors, almost gray-scale at times.
This was not a coincidence. Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski opted to remove the protective coating from his camera lenses and put the film through a process to remove color from each frame. They wanted to make it look less like a professionally filmed movie, and more like a 1940s newsreel.
The movement of the actors at times appears choppy, and the explosions seem to happen even more suddenly than usual.
This was not a coincidence. The shutter timing was lowered from the traditional 180-degree timing to 90 degrees or even 45 degrees in some sequences to intentionally create a less polished look.
Spielberg, as he often does, collaborated with John Williams to create the musical score. As you watch the scene, you might notice — there’s no music until the last minute or so.
This was not a coincidence. It’s just the auditory whiplash of bullets, bombs, and screams. Spielberg gave Williams the day off in order to preserve the brutal reality of the scene. There would be no distractions.
I could (quite literally) talk about the opening sequence all day. They cast real amputees to play the extras who lost limbs, to make those injures look more realistic. They created 1000 high-detail dummies to litter the beach as soldiers killed in action. They used 2000 gallons of fake blood to color the seawater. Every single choice they made in the scene was to amp up the realism and tone down anything that seemed “Hollywood.” And it worked. Upon its release, World War II veterans called the sequence (and the whole movie) the most realistic depiction of combat ever put to film. Some were even overcome by the realness and left theaters. The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs was even moved to create a hotline as support for veterans who were affected by the film. It’s as real as real can get.
The full movie clocks in at just under three hours, but somehow it doesn’t actually feel that long. It moves quickly, in large part because some of the more high-energy sequences happen suddenly. Hanks and the team are marching across the dairy fields of northern France, griping about the mission and making fun of their interpreter (Upham — played by Jeremy Davies), when suddenly it starts to rain, hard, and then the sound of those raindrops morph into the sound of flying bullets and one of the members of the team ends up dead. They get out of town and keep looking for Private Ryan, until they come across a German machine gun squad, and end up losing another member of the team. They continue to argue if the mission is worth it, and almost suffer a mutiny, until Tom Hanks comes in to set them all straight. It’s his best scene in the movie. Just a few minutes later, by pure dumb luck, almost, the find Private Ryan. The only problem is, he doesn’t want to go home, and tells everyone as such with the best line in the movie.
And so, Hanks and his team stay to help Ryan and Ryan’s unit defend the bridge. And what you get is another 20+ minute warfare sequence that is (at times) just as brutal and honest as the scene on Omaha beach.
From the first minute to the last, Saving Private Ryan is a masterpiece of harsh, honest, and unrelenting filmmaking. It’s probably Spielberg’s best work ever, or at the very least, his best work of the last 25 years.
While Hanks is magnificent (in my opinion, it’s the best performance of his career), I’m possibly even more impressed by the supporting cast. The other members of the team were not well-known in 1998 by any stretch of the imagination. Tom Sizemore had made a few appearances in a few high-profile movies (Heat, Wyatt Earp, Natural Born Killers), but was far from a star. Among the other six main actors, the -best- credit among them prior to 1998 was either Adam Goldberg in Dazed & Confused (which has become a classic but nobody saw when it actually came out) or Ed Burns for The Brothers McMullen (which, again, was well received but not exactly a blockbuster).
It’s frankly kind of incredible that so many of these actors went on to become known actors. Vin Diesel is obviously an action franchise unto himself at this point. Giovanni Ribisi is one of the best character actors of his generation and was the lead actor on a very well-received Amazon series for three seasons. Ed Burns has written and directed over 10 movies and became famous enough to play himself on Entourage. Jeremy Davies had recurring roles on Lost and Justified. Adam Goldberg was in A Beautiful Mind and Zodiac and has guest starred on just about every TV show of the last 20 years. Even Barry Pepper has made a successful career out of just appearing in any war movie that has a role for him. Compare Saving Private Ryan to, say, Black Hawk Down or We Were Soldiers, other ensemble war movies from the same era. Look at the cast of either movies and count all of the dudes that you just never heard from again. It’s a testament to the casting process that Spielberg employed — rather than find actors that could play a specific role, he looked for actors that fit a certain look. For the supporting roles, he cared more about if they looked like a World War II soldier than anything else, and he looked for lesser-known actors so they could disappear into their roles.
The ultimate takeaway of Saving Private Ryan are the last lines that Tom Hanks speaks to Matt Damon. “Earn this.” It’s a line I think about a lot. It doesn’t just apply to a soldier who finds his way home thanks to the sacrifice of others. It applies to every person, just about every day. For all of us, someone, somewhere, has sacrificed something so that our life could be some degree easier. It’s an interconnected world, and the actions of one person can affect the lives of many. James Ryan can draw a direct line between his life and the sacrifice laid down by the men that crossed France to find him, but we can all live our lives on a day-to-day basis in an effort to honor the people who helped us get here. There aren’t very many movies that I proactively think about on a regular basis. Like, I don’t sit around thinking about what message I should be taking away from Ocean’s 11. But Saving Private Ryan is one of those movies that sticks with me.
When I was younger, I thought the graphic realism of war was cool. It was exciting to see soldiers shoot other soldiers. That’s kind of just how kids are. Re-watching it now, it wasn’t cool. It was kind of depressing. 4400 allied soldiers died on D-Day alone, almost as many that died in the entirety of the Iraq war, and more than have died in Afghanistan. If you look at the numbers for the full invasion of France, allied troops suffered 225,000 casualties. Totals for the war on all sides have been estimated over 25 million people. These are mind-blowing numbers in the context of modern warfare. Saving Private Ryan only shows a slice of that, but it shows it the way it needs to be shown. It’s not always an enjoyable movie to watch, but it’s done near-perfectly. It’s my favorite war movie ever, and my 9th-favorite movie of all time.
(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)
Here’s our progress on the list so far:
6. The Fugitive
9. Saving Private Ryan
11. The Big Short
17. Ocean’s 11
24. Apollo 13
31. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
45. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
47. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
67. Batman Begins
76. Finding Nemo
85. Seabiscuit
93. The Truman Show
