Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 1
The more I look at it, the more I feel Saving Private Ryan is Steven Spielberg’s best movie. It’s not fun like Raiders, not fun like Jaws for that matter, and perhaps a tad less startlingly original than Close Encounters. It’s more emotionally devastating than Schindler or E.T., and less manipulative than both — it earns its sucker-punches several dozen times over. It’s a little earnest and occasionally leaden in its use of irony, but the execution — oh my lord, the execution. Conceptually, as a work of cinema there is little new, but Spielberg pushes his work as a director into ever-more sophisticated and surprising areas. The movie’s philosophy is simple — deceptively so — and presents a vision of wartime sacrifice and patriotism of unusual depth and complexity. Hold on, this is going to be really long.