War films have been produced since the dawn of narrative cinema. Countless films have been made about World War II, during and after the campaign. Certain aesthetics have been integrated into the war film as trends have moved into showing war how it actually is and not the glorified and exciting action adventures of past decades. As time has moved on, more and more people have seen what war is actually like on Newsreels and Television (Vietnam was the first Television War). As far back as 1930 when Lewis Milestone released All Quiet On The Western Front, War has been portrayed as a negative event. .
It could be said that every possible way of portraying war has been explored by a director in some way. Madness in Apocalypse Now (1979), Action & Adventure in Where Eagles Dare (1969), the epic scale of war in The Longest Day (1962) and authentism in Saving Private Ryan (1998). These last two films are about the invasion of Normandy on the 6th June 1944. One of the bigger sequences of The Longest Day is the Omaha beach landing by American troops at 6:30am. This battle makes up the 25 minute sequence under examination in this essay from its portrayal in Saving Private Ryan (Henceforth will be referred to as Ryan).
Ryan is not the first time Steven Spielberg has directed a film set around the time of WWII. He has also made films that have treated the war as both fantasy and harsh reality. The Indiana Jones trilogy portrayed event preceding the war with fantastic action and caricature Nazi's. Schindler's List showed that war from the point-of-view of the holocaust and genocide of Jews. Ryan has possibly made more of an impact than his previous films, it has especially enjoyed examination by the academic side of film criticism;.
Highly acclaimed in some quarters for its intensely realistic' depiction of the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach in June 1944, the historical events on which the film is based are remembered both for the numbers who died in the offensive and as the beginning of the invasion that eventually led to the Allies' victory.