“Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it!” — Marlowe

This movie is full of gratuitous violence, blood, gore, grue and death. In other words, it is probably one of the most realistic cinematic renditions of a war that I have seen. No John Waynes here.

The film begins with the June, 1944, D-Day human wave assault on the heavily fortified Normandy beaches. We are treated to more than a quarter of an hour scenes such as (a) one soldier having his leg blown off, (b) another one hunting for his missing arm — and finding it, (c) yet another one lying on his back trying to hold his intestines in his stomach — too late; some of them are lying in a pile next to him, (d) yet another one being pinged on his helmet, taking it off to look at the dent, and having the back of his head blown out by a second shot. Et cetera. Never mind — the survivors get their own back, by blowing away shocked Germans who are trying to surrender. As you may guess, this film is perhaps a bit too intense for small children.

We focus down on Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), a sometime teacher of English composition and baseball coach from Pennsylvania, who, together with a part of what is left of his platoon, is dispatched to find Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), only survivor of four brothers from a farm in Iowa. The next hour and a half is devoted to this groups trek across the sometimes idyllic, sometimes totally ruined, landscapes of Normandy (actually Ireland, I believe), punctuated by short encounters and battles in which two of the men are killed. Ultimately, once Ryan is found, the last hour is given over to a reprise of the first half hour, with the men helping Ryan’s group protect a bridge against a German onslaught.

Despite the carnage, the film never stoops to become an anti-war sermon; after all, the struggle in World War II’s European theatre, of all the wars America has fought in more than 200 years, is probably the most justifiable, a point of which Producer-Director Steven Spielberg is well aware. It does raise a number of questions which remain, for me at least, unanswered: how much is a single target worth in human lives? what are the responsibilities of a captor to his captives? how far is one to go in following orders? and, of course, how many lives should we expend to (possibly) save a single human life? The last question, of course, is not strictly a military one — the phenomenon of the search party under hazardous conditions is well known even in civilian middle America.

All in all, a film worth seeing, but, I suspect, too intense to draw many back for a second viewing.