Saving Private Ryan Review

In 1999 the Oscar for Best Picture went to Shakespeare in Love , which took the prize in a highly disputed and controversial one-on-one with Saving Private Ryan . Someone said then that if only the first twenty-seven minutes were evaluated, Steven Spielberg 's film would have won by KO It was one more of the many boutades that are usually made when a winner has to be chosen among several candidates, but the truth is More than a decade later, that opening scene of D-Day on Omaha Beachhas gone down in film history and, on the other hand, the adventures of the English bard have been fading. Something especially striking considering that Steven Spielberg did win the Oscar for Best Director.

Saving private Ryan in its original title was born from an idea that the screenwriter Robert Rodat conceived after knowing the case of the Nilands , four American brothers who during World War II were sent to the front and, for a time, it was believed that three of them They had died; then it turned out that only two, since the third was a prisoner in a concentration camp in Burma but alive. The others fell precisely during the Normandy landings , the setting chosen by Spielberg to open the film itself, after a prologue as sentimental as it is unnecessary in which a veteran visits a grave that, in the end, we will know is that of his savior.

That character is Private Ryan from the title, equivalent to Sergeant Frederick Niland , who was considered a survivor of the aforementioned family and who, however, does not appear in a recognizable way until almost the last part of the film. And it is that the true protagonist is Captain Miller , who is entrusted with the mission of looking for him and taking him back to his home to prevent his mother from losing her four offspring from her. In fact, the communication to her of the news of the three deaths through a fully visual scene, without dialogue and shot in wide shot (a car with an army officer approaches her house and she, seeing it from the porch, imagines the worst and is about to pass out) is one of the bestof the movie.

This raises the moral problem around which the argument revolves: having received the order to search for that soldier who remains and take him to a safe place (he is a paratrooper dropped in the German rear), Miller, with seven men, has to cross the front line and into hostile territory, risking scores of lives to save one .

Lives that have managed to survive the terrible landing, embodied with a realism and crudeness never before seen (with severed limbs, bursting skulls, the shore of the beach dyed red, the cold-blooded execution of those who surrender...), as subtly shown. the scene of the soldiers counting the dozens of plates of the fallen. This will lead more than one to threaten to rebel during the mission, in a tension that is only capable of redirecting a detail as insignificant as discovering the pre-war profession of his superior.

In between, there are various avatars that include a harrowing shootout with a French family in the middle, an intense sniper duel , the confrontation of some with the well-intentioned translator determined not to kill a German prisoner and, when they finally find Private Ryan, the surprise that he refuses to accompany them. Something, the latter, that gives rise to another interesting situation beyond the mastery with which Spielberg resolves that action scene: the painful casualties suffered during the search led the soldiers to say that it was better that this Ryan was worthy of that tribute. of lives they had paid.

And, in effect, he turns out to be a one-piece guy who, having lost his blood brothers, prefers to keep the ones he has left, the ones in arms, to defend a bridge from an imminent German counterattack, which leads to an epilogue that connects with the opening scene; "Make yourself worthy of this" Miller had told him before he died.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) was made by DreamWorks , the studio founded by Spielberg the previous year, in collaboration with another of his production companies, Amblin and the major Paramount . The director, who was given full creative control by producer Mark Gordon, aspired to break a bit from the tradition of World War II movies to get closer to the raw realism of recent war films about the war in Vietnam.

That is why he wanted to introduce the viewer, camera on his shoulder and without prior storyboarding (an unusual thing for him), improvising amid the whistling bullets and explosions that thundered on Omaha Beach. It was not in Normandy where that shocking scene was shot but in Wexford (Ireland), with a thousand and a half Irish reservists and historical re-enactors as extras, but original landing craft were used . Of the seventy million dollars of the total budget, twelve were used in those first twenty-seven minutes, which gives one of the importance that was granted to them.

At Spielberg's request, Janusz Kaminski , his cinematographer since 1993, more than halved the color saturation and brightness to obtain period-like images. Thanks to this he won his second Oscar; the first was also with the same director, for Schindler's List , and both works were included in the list of the best photographed films of the 20th century by the American Society of Cinematographers . The awards for Best Editing, Best Sound and Best Sound Editing were also obtained.-in addition to Spielberg himself, as we saw at the beginning-, staying at the gates of Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Screenplay (the aforementioned Robert Rodat), Best Soundtrack (the usual John Williams), Best Makeup and Best Direction Artistic. Instead, the triumph was total at the Golden Globes (film and director).

Tom Hanks, who won the role of Miller beating Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson, underwent harsh military training with the rest of the cast ; he would later co-produce with the director the series Hermanos de sangre . Matt Damon , who was chosen to play Ryan because he was still unknown (Robin Williams recommended him to Spielberg and a few months before the premiere he had a surprise triumph with Good Will Hunting ), also underwent a similar but separate training, so that the others, who played his rescuers, did not have such a close relationship with him , as it should be shown on the screen. Hanks and Damon, by the way, improvised the scene .in which its characters chat about their lives before the final battle.

Other prominent members of the cast were Tom Sizemore , who had to pass a daily drug test to show that he was complying with the plan against his addiction, and Vin Diesel , who at that time had only worked on Awakenings, the short film Multi-Facial and Strays , these two last projects that he himself wrote, produced and directed.

Spielberg, for his part, had always expressed his desire to direct a film about World War II as a tribute to his father , who fought in it, since, although 1941, Empire of the Sun and Schindler's List are set in that contest, they are not exactly warlike. He expected a modest success because the harshness of the images -40 barrels of blood were used to water the beach at the beginning and dozens of mutilated people were hired- would force the film to be restricted for adults, with the consequent repercussion in a lower box office; but, to his surprise, the result was a success with the public (it raised almost 482 million dollarshaving cost 70). Also critical, praising his fidelity to the story except for small inconsequential details pointed out by some other veteran (and that the sounds of the weapons were recorded from real shots).

And it is that, although the final battle is dramatic and visceral - memorable the moment in which the sergeant and a German throw their respective helmets - the opening scene is still the star. After all, Operation Overlord (that is, the invasion of the continent by the Allies) was one of the keys to the war and it is rare who has not heard something about it: on the famous D-day there was an amphibious attack on four beaches in the Normandy region, involving about five thousand ships and one hundred and sixty thousand soldiers , to all of which were added airborne forces launched in the German rear.

It was not the first time that the landing in Normandy was shown because it had already been done, among others, by Henry Koster in 1956 with D-Day, June 6 (D-Day, teh Six of June), Ken Annakin in 1962 with The longest day (The longest day) in 1962, Stuart Cooper in 1975 with Overlord and Samuel Fuller in 1980 with Uno Rojo, shock division (The Big Red One), to cite the most outstanding examples. But none of them reached the degree of realism, tension and violence of Saving Private Ryan .