SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

• Starring Tom Hanks and Matt Damon
• Directed by Steven Spielberg
• Rated R, with extremely strong combat violence; running time 168 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a 10

By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle

(July 24, 1998) -- From its opening moments, when bloody hell erupts on Omaha Beach, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is hard to watch.

But it's important to see.

With its riveting combat drama played out against a D-Day backdrop, Saving Private Ryan is a masterpiece of World War II heroism.

The film will hold your heart hostage for nearly three hours with its relentless, realistic carnage, its portraits of ordinary men displaying extraordinary courage and its complex moral dilemmas.

Saving Private Ryan is about eight men who barely survive D-Day, only to be asked to risk their lives to save another G.I.

He's Private Ryan (Matt Damon), a paratrooper who must be found and sent home because his three brothers have all been killed elsewhere in the war, and the Army doesn't want his mother to lose a fourth child.

Tom Hanks stars as Captain John Miller, the quietly competent leader of the squad given the Ryan duty. In a performance that ranks among the best by this two-time Oscar-winner, Hanks creates a new kind of war hero: a complex figure with fears and doubts but a conviction to do his duty, if only so he can go home.

Spielberg guided Hanks and the capable supporting actors, including Ed Burns and Tom Sizemore, to performances that are totally free of machismo or bravado.

The humanity of the men is always evident, from the country-boy sharpshooter who says a prayer before each squeeze of the trigger, to the timid squad interpreter who cowers on a staircase, unable to lift his gun when a German soldier walks right by him.

Though Saving Private Ryan marks a return to the clear-cut good and evil of World War II films, Spielberg injects a new, terrifying realism -- a tribute, perhaps, to the unblinking honesty of a filmmaker raised in the Vietnam era.

Filmgoers will be rocked by the horrors before them, especially in the 25-minute Omaha Beach invasion that opens the film.

Young soldiers clutch crosses and Stars of David on chains around ther necks, while they vomit and shake in their landing craft. G.I.s drown in blood-red water, weighed down by their backpacks before they can even get to the beach. A dazed youth walks by, carrying his own detached arm. Another lies on his back, dying, crying for his mother.

The herky-jerky hand-held cameras of Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski bring the immediacy of news footage to the incredible carnage, as blood, body parts and dead fish despoil the surf of Normandy.

But through such intensely violent scenes -- and the actions of the men depicted so brilliantly in them -- Spielberg brings credibility and immense weight to the drama that follows.

Filmgoers will understand better than ever the price many of our fathers and grandfathers paid to secure our freedom.

In Schindler's List, Spielberg created the most powerful film ever about the tragic, horrific stupidity of hatred. In Saving Private Ryan -- a film just as magnificent -- he defines the true meaning of valor and sacrifice.

And in the story of the need to save one man, Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat have created a perfect metaphor for the effort to save all of us whose way of life would be preserved.

The stunning, heartfelt realization of this great film is this: We are all Private Ryan.