Steven Spielberg wants his audience pulled into the story he’s telling. If the characters in Jurassic Park are awed by the sight of dinosaurs, the lauded director is out to ensure viewers feel similar shock. It’s the same reason he continues to inspire people to want to be Indiana Jones, as Spielberg can entice your sense of wonder even beyond the confines of his films. The ability to immerse his audiences in the reality of his films goes even deeper with his classic war movies.
It’s hard to shake the haunting realities of the Holocaust as seen in Spielberg’s masterpiece Schindler’s List, as he captures human cruelty in a way that confronts societal complacency. This is also true of his classic 1998 war movie Saving Private Ryan, where audiences are shown the harrowing, violent nature of battle in visceral ways no film had truly captured before. While the Omaha Beach sequence rattles viewers from the start, it’s the characters that drive the emotional heart of the story. Spielberg’s ability to immerse his audience, no matter the circumstances, often comes with a deep existential dread of war’s hellish realities and of humanity itself. One of the best ways the director does this is by humanizing the characters and the conflict through impeccable dialogue that still lives rent-free in our minds 28 years later.
‘Saving Private Ryan’s Simple Question Is Deeply Philosophical
The entire plot of Saving Private Ryan lives up to the film’s title, as a squad is dispatched to rescue the last surviving brother of the Ryan family. It’s a harrowing journey that sees them losing men in the service of rescuing another. Once they find Matt Damon’s Private James Ryan, they inform him that all his brothers are deceased, and they have been tasked with bringing him home. Understandably, Ryan wants to stay and fight alongside the men he’s been entrenched with, which rubs his saviors the wrong way. After learning soldiers died trying to save him, Damon gives an impeccable performance while delivering a sobering, existential question:
“It doesn’t make any sense, sir. Why? Why do I deserve to go? Why not any of these guys? They all fought just as hard as me.”
Ryan’s question encapsulates the film’s themes, which challenge the value of a single life amid mass casualties. It’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s on the audience’s mind as much as Ryan’s. His confounding inquiry mires viewers in his mental state and the emotional stakes of the moment. He’s processing a lot of information and coping with survivor’s guilt. Ryan asks a simple question that carries an impossible weight that can never be given a satisfying answer.
In Ryan’s existential crisis, he perfectly captures the futility of all wars, and Spielberg highlights the true hellishness of conflict. If Ryan wasn’t more valuable, were the soldiers’ sacrifices in vain? What makes him worthy of such a mission? These are the questions that clearly haunt the character for the rest of his life, as seen in the bookending graveyard scenes where he’s still managing the guilt. Tom Hanks’s Captain Miller responds with a line the audience can sympathize with, asking:
“Is that what I’m supposed to tell your mother when she gets another folded American flag?”
Spielberg then shows why he’s a master, shifting to the heroism of the soldiers on the battlefield. Ryan replies by noting that his fellow soldiers are “the only brothers” he has left, bringing a commendable focus to those actually on the front lines of conflict. Ryan responds:
“You can tell her that when you found me, I was with the only brothers I had left. And that there was no way I was deserting them. I think she’d understand that.”
With Ryan refocusing the argument on the camaraderie on the battlefield, he hits on why Saving Private Ryan is one of the best war movies ever made. Spielberg isn’t looking to glorify war, but rather to honor those forced to fight in it and the individual circumstances that motivate each person. There is value in individual lives, even if the war seems pointless. Those are the emotional stakes that make a war worth fighting, and even while combating deep existential dread, there is truth in the bonds formed in the trenches of battle. There are plenty of reasons Spielberg is a master, with Saving Private Ryan as chief among them.
- Release Date
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July 24, 1998
- Runtime
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169 minutes
