The WWII movie I chose to watch was Saving Private Ryan. In a nutshell, the movie is about eight soldiers on a mission to inform Pvt. Ryan of his brother's death and bring him back home.
The movie starts out on a high note with a very gruesome and gritty D-day scene, setting the tone for the rest of the movie. It really disturbed me how many soldiers got mowed down without even leaving the landing craft. The scene lasts for a while and has a few moments that stuck with me, such as, the soldier standing straight up and looking around for his arm. This scene also introduces most of the main characters. Capt. Miller played by Tom Hanks takes command of the remaining soldiers along the beach and manages to take out the gun positions leading to a victory. But the movie doesn't emphasize the victory but instead focuses on the bodies along the beach. All of the fire fight scenes are incredibly long and realistic with the exception of one where the audience sees it through the eyes of a third party, Upham the translator. Capt. Miller is given a mission to find Pvt. Ryan and he takes with him eight other soldiers. All of the soldiers are really good characters and surprisingly easy to tell apart. The search for Ryan becomes more complicated as time progresses and two soldiers die trying to find him(Vin Diesel and the medic). Even at the end of the movie the mission is left morally ambiguous. Almost every character points out how risking eight men to send one home is probably a bad move including Ryan himself when they finally find him. The more characters die the more tension there is with the rest of the characters. It gets to the point that it looks like they're going to vent their anger on a German P.O.W. and one of them almost deserts when they don't. They finally find Ryan and he refuses to go home because he wants to stay and defend the bridge he's been defending. Miller decides to stay and protect the bridge with the limited resources they have. What follows is a half an hour long war scene that has the most intimidating portrayal of tanks I've seen, and results in the death of most of the characters. Finally it gets bad enough that Miller prepares to blow up the bridge but get's mortally wounded before he can do so. Then reinforcements come and save the day.
I really liked this movie. I expected it to be either a patriotic pro war film or a preachy anti war film, but what it was felt more real than either of those expectations. I find it hard to say that the film felt realistic because of the tinted camera and dramatic lighting, but it definitely had some of the most realistic looking gore I've ever seen. The movie is amazing beautiful with it's lighting and cinematography. There were some really intense shots at the beginning that put you in the first person perspective a soldier. The sound was also good but I listened to it using a pair of shoddy headphones so I felt like I didn't get the full experience. My favorite part of the movie though was the moral ambiguity of everything. It doesn't have any definitive answers at the end, and the audience gets left to wonder on the questions raised. The movie has a lot of shocking moments, but the one that got to me the most was at the end, when Upham, an inexperienced soldier finally takes action and holds several Germans at gun point. He then proceeds to shoot the German he defended against the other eight soldiers earlier in the film, seemingly without provocation. I don't know why but out of all the moments that was what disturbed me the most.
I suppose to wrap this up, I really enjoyed this movie.
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