A certain scenario has often flashed through my head, if a war was to break out and I was made to fight, how long would I last? Would I be one of those unfortunate few who take a bullet between the eyes the very moment combat begins, or would I actually be able to make it through the hellishly intense moments of battle? Also, would I be too afraid of my own mortality to fight or will the emergency of the situation drive all such thoughts out of my head? I’m quite handy with a weapon and at one point in my youth I was quite a gun nut. Hopefully all of that doesn’t just vanish when the target is actually shooting back at you. Each time I watch the beach landing sequence of Saving Private Ryan (1998), this scenario plays with vivid lucidity in my head and I wonder whether I’d actually make it past the direct fusillade of machine gun fire and onto the beach? The funny thing is, the older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve seen the film, the earlier I see myself ventilated with bullets. When watching the film this time, for the first time in the cinema for that matter too, I didn’t even make it out of the fucking boat.
When I found out that the local cinema was screening this film, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity, and no self-isolation was going to stop me. Just to clarify that point in my defence here, I do not see the point of isolating after a damn flight when all of my COVID tests have come back negative, I’ve been vaccinated and I haven’t shown any sign of what could even be close to a symptom. In any case, I’m moving cities in less than two weeks, so I’ll be damned if I’m made to spend 10 days out of my last two weeks in this city holed up in a room. But of course, the government see it a slightly differently to me and I don’t want to pay a hefty fine of £1000 if I get caught out, so I took some precautions, also known as lying, as to not become a blip on their track and trace radar. Just as I was about to approach the man standing at the door, I was preparing myself to spin this fantastic web of lies to him just so I wouldn’t have to show my ID, but all of that was useless anyway because the man didn’t even ask for it. When all he needed was a name, phone number and a scan of my ticket, I just wrote down Hal Nyne Thou-zand as the name, an old dead phone number and strolled right on through after showing my ticket. No one polices this.
Anyway, moving past that valueless parable, I watched Saving Private Ryan in the way it should properly be watched and the experience was overpowering. I sat there; my head embedded into the seat as the viscerality of the film kept me held in my place. I first watched the movie at a very young age when I found the DVD copy of it lying around the house and watched it without my foster parent’s permission late at night, so imagine the shock on the face of this trouble-seeking child who’s just stumbled across one of the bloodiest film openings he’s ever seen. I turned it off right after because I just watched to see the gore. Witnessing that pandemonium again, but spread out across the length of a giant wall this time, made me feel like I was watching it as a child again, but without my gratuitous quest for blood and guts. Through my years I learnt how significant that sequence is, how accurately it portrays the nightmare of being in that situation and all the lives lost in the process of moving a few years down the beach and out of the line of gunfire. The nightmare and significance are taken to an epic scale when you see it on the cinema screen.
I hear loud explosions cracking across the sky outside. Sounds like gunshots.
False alarm, just fireworks. Here I was thinking the war is finally here, at our very doorsteps. Or just maniac hooligan letting go of some bullets in the air. Where would he have gotten his hands on that gun anyway? Let’s drop this tangent before it grows into something giant and incurable.
For those of you who haven’t seen the film thus far, a team of soldiers, after making it out within a nanometre of their lives and with their numbers severally cut down, go looking for a private Ryan deep behind enemy lines, who’s brothers have all died in combat, so they can send him home in one piece rather than the top brass having to turn him into the fourth letter being sent to his mother informing her of all her sons’ deaths. I always seem to forget how simple yet beautiful the premise is, where there comes a point that duty doesn’t matter anymore when compassion and empathy enter the equation.
What the cinematography creates is this grainy, washed out look achieved by tinkering around with the protective filters of the camera, which makes the film closely resemble archive footage. When you put that gritty realism together with the great lengths crossed to ensure historical accuracy, the film takes on an essence of a colourised newsreel document of the war which is perched on the personal and the civic. The camera is handled with such meticulous carelessness in the whirlwind moments of combat, less panning and more careening around to try and get a tenuous grasp on what the hell is happening all around the characters. It almost feels like someone swapped out Robert Capa’s camera for a film camera just before he landed on the beach. Then there’s moments of kinetic serenity, where the brakes are pulled on the action, but not without any sense of looming tension that any moment now the air around them will be split with gunfire. When you consider that all, or most, war movies are in effect anti-war movies by the way they depict the grim realities of war, this one in particular does it in a way that doesn’t spare on the action.
The vortex pace of the film’s opening really takes it out you because it brings you into the film with the rest of the characters, perfect preparation for those sombre moments of walking from objective to objective during which the dialogue gets to shine. With fully realised characters who feel like actual people caught within the twisting hold of a situation fucked up beyond al recognition, comes dialogue which feels human. With what little they tell us about their lives back home in the shape of small stories or anecdotes, we get a firm idea of the people they are and the conflicts within them.
Then there’s John Williams’ fantastic and grand marshal score, punctuating the film with horns that tug at the emotions. Even though most marshal music sounds pretty much like it’s composed by the same person, one can hear Williams’ aural carvings on the notes, purely based by how epic the proportions are. But what really does it more for me is the sound design. Each bullet rips through the air, every explosion sounds like the peels of thunder when nature is at her wildest of moods, and the rumbling of tank tracks in the distant mark such foreboding company that I felt like I was in the midst of a battle field, especially as all the sounds bounced around the cinema hall.
My girlfriend doesn’t like war films at all so I just end up watching these ones myself. Burt if you have the stomach for war films, this is one that is written through history and has made itself out as one of the most culturally significant ones around. The way I see it, if a war film gets your imagination running to such a length that you find yourself within that blood stained, bullet hell of a world, it’s doing its job properly.
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