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Phil LandonUniversity of Maryland - Baltimore County, landon[commat]charm.net
The remarkable critical and box office success of Stephen Spielberg's, Saving Private Ryan, has been widely attributed to the film's uncompromising realism. In it, Spielberg offers his version of the D-Day landings on the Normandy Beaches during June, 1944. The story begins in the memory of the title figure, now a man in his seventies making a pilgrimage to the battlefield where he had landed with the 101st Airborne Division a half century earlier. As Ryan (Matt Damon) kneels before a grave, the film cuts to landing craft filled with a company of Army Rangers led by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks). They are among the first troops to land Omaha Beach, and, for the next half hour, the film plunges the audience into the midst of their hellish experience in what has been described by military historians and D-Day veterans as Hollywood's most grimly realistic and historically accurate depiction of a World War II battlefield.
The Omaha Beach sequence is the first of three relatively self-contained movements which make up the film's
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central narrative. The second begins a day later when Miller and six survivors of his shattered company are ordered to search the landing zones of the 101st Airborne for a Private Ryan. The paratrooper's three brothers have been killed in action (two of them on D-Day), and Chief of Staff General George Marshall (Harve Presnell), out of pity for their mother, decides to save her last surviving son. As Miller and his men, now joined by Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), a translator and linguist with no combat experience, move inland, their meditations on the meaning of their battlefield experience and the moral justification of their mission become as important as finding the last Ryan brother. When they do find him, he is among a small, leaderless group of paratroopers charged with preventing a bridge on the Mederet River from falling into the hands of counter-attacking Germans.
Ryan tells Miller that the men in his unit are the only brothers he has left and refuses to leave his...