Saving Private Ryan

            In Analyzing Steven Spielberg's movie Saving Private Ryan, I realized that I can not base a movie only on realism. A good movie has to have some kind of character or formalism to carry the viewer through these realistic scenes. . In my critique I wish to point out some uses of realism, formalism, and stereotypes in the movie Saving Private Ryan. In my eyes Saving Private Ryan is a masterpiece. Although the movie is nearly three hours in length, it is evenly distributed and takes on a powerful subject. Private Ryan was not another war movie; I really felt it caught the soul of war. The film begins with a half-hour sequence of the landings at Normandy on D-Day. Many films have portrayed this D-Day scene, but have failed to me in realism. In Private Ryan, realism portrayed in a nearly replica of war. To achieve this Steven Spielberg displayed the battle scenes, as the next step could be the moment of death. Limbs are blown off in mid-shot; guts splay out of uniforms and onto the sandy beach; soldier in mid-sentence are startled by bullet holes blossoming on their foreheads. Bloods sticks to the lens of the camera. In doing so, Spielberg mastered the opening of Saving Private Ryan as far as realism. Roberts 2 the D-Day sequence actually has nothing to do with the story of Saving Private Ryan. Formalism kicks in when Miller receives orders to retrieve a private Ryan (Matt Damon) from somewhere on the forward line in France. Ryan's brothers have all died in combat in the last week, and General wants to pull the private back to the states, to spare Mrs. Ryan the heartbreak of having all of her boys killed in action. Never have I seen a documentary that made a box office hit solely on realism so I feel Spielberg's plot was well worth wild. Not only did I see realism and formalism in Saving Private Ryan but also Spielberg's platoon of men consisted of the usual melting-pot collection of stereotypes.