Film Pick of the Week: Saving Private Ryan - review by Yvette Huddleston

Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Published 17th Jun 2024, 06:00 BST

This month is the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Landings in June 1944 and there has been a series of documentaries across television and radio to mark the occasion. Steven Spielberg’s peerless 1998 movie is still one of the most powerful of the many film versions that have been made over the decades and is well worth revisiting. Apart from anything else it remains an outstanding highlight of Tom Hanks’ long, illustrious career.

He gives a beautifully understated performance as everyman hero Captain John Miller who is part of a US Army battalion that lands at Omaha Beach. Having sustained terrible losses, Miller takes charge and leads the surviving members of his company to safety. Miller then receives orders from the most senior military officials back in Washington to track down a young soldier from Iowa – Private James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon) – who is the last surviving brother of four, his three siblings having died in action. The mission is to find Private Ryan and send him home, to spare the family any further loss.

Miller assembles a small detachment to help him track Ryan down – they include his friend and second in command Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore), rebellious Richard Reiben (Ed Burns), battle-hardened Adrian Caparzo (Vin Diesel), wisecracking Stanley Mellis (Adam Goldberg), crack sniper Daniel Jackson (Barry Pepper), interpreter Timothy Upham (Jeremy Davies) and medic Irwin Wade (Giovanni Ribisi). It is a dangerous mission and none of the men are convinced of its merit – for them it is yet another example of orders being handed down by generals who are far removed from the bloody reality of the situation on the ground. Nevertheless, they pull together behind the firm and fair leadership of Miller.

A scene from in Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg is, of course, a master of epic filmmaking of this scale and he delivers an affecting, but never saccharine, old-fashioned war movie that balances visceral action set pieces with quieter moments of introspection and bonding between the men. As in all his films, there is so much humanity here – and the actors all rise to the challenge of the sometimes-devastating material, to truly honour the memory of all those who were lost.

What is most impressive about the film is its authenticity, especially in the gruelling 30-minute opening sequence which depicts the brutality and chaos of the beach landings in which scores of terrified young soldiers died, many of them even before they managed to reach the shore.