Saving Private Ryan

Radiohead is one of my all-time favorite bands. Their run of albums from The Bends to In Rainbows (six in total) is, in my opinion, one album after another of legendary status and unparalleled excellence. The album directly following this, The King Of Limbs, was not; it wasn't bad, per se, but it showed a band who had innovated in the world of rock music suddenly taking it easy. Re-exploring familiar ground. I was disappointed. When their next album (what would prove to be, up to this point, their last) was preceded by the single "Burn The Witch", which would also be the first song on the album, I was excited. Radiohead sounded fresh. Energized. Vibrant. But the album it came from, A Moon Shaped Pool, dives off a cliff after that lead track, the next ten or so songs blending together in a homogeneous lump of mid-tempo dirges that sound indecipherable from each other without the benefit of looking at run times. Not a single song reached the heights of "Burn The Witch". It is still a well-made album, and it sounds like Radiohead, but it sounds like Radiohead fulfilling an obligation, not pursuing a passion. Every other song, you've heard them do before, and with more gusto, more menace, more of their special, secret ingredients that make even the slowest, most depressing songs come alive. That's Saving Private Ryan. The opening 20 minutes (unnecessary wrap segment aside) is breathtaking, both as a piece of dramatic cinema and as a technical achievement. It is, possibly, the most realistic war has ever looked on screen: chaotic, uncontrolled, driven by luck as well as strategy. Soldiers mentally breaking as bullets are flying, or getting caught up in the moment and over-stepping their orders. The blood and bodies, the explosions, all of it. It is harrowing and horrific and amazing, and nothing in the two or so hours that follows even remotely approaches it. That's not to say the actors aren't working like their lives depended on it, or that the action isn't well-staged, or that anything is done at half-speed. But after that opening sequence, the rest of the movie settles into a lull of war movie cliches the way a football fan settles into their recliner on a Sunday before the first kickoff. Saving Private Ryan is comfortable doing all the cliches because its director, Steven Spielberg, can't help but beat the Baby Boomer nostalgia drum until he breaks the head. Re-litigating the events that shaped his generation drives so many of his movies, and this is no exception, recycling every band-of-brothers, "no man left behind", one brave final stand cliche you can possibly think of from every John Wayne and Gary Cooper movie from the 40's and 50's. The two hours after the opening are little more than a wartime movie greatest hits compilation with a 1998 glow-up. Again, it's all staged well, and the entire cast is fantastic, but if you've seen any World War II movies, you've seen what Saving Private Ryan has to offer after they get off the beach. And that's really the story with Saving Private Ryan. There's very little to nitpick here, because Spielberg is excellent at the technical aspects of making a movie, and the cast is full of outstanding actors in roles both big and small. There's a reason that, whenever someone talks about this movie, it's about the Normandy scene, because it's not just the most memorable scene of the movie, it's the only one.