Confession: I didn't like the movie "Saving Private Ryan"

I find that movie to be incredibly depressing. The Army send seven men into certain death in order to get some good PR? And this is supposed to be inspirational? Are they kidding? This movie makes me embarassed to be an American.

Too depressing....

I didn't appreciate the violence of war until I saw this movie.

I never saw it andI don't have a desire to see it.

Does that make me a bad person?

:shrug:

hated the message that if you show a kindness to the enemy, he will return to kill you


never understood how the Hanks people "saved" Ryan.... indeed, he "saved" Hanks by giving Hanks a reason to believe that he was fighting for good cause....

it scared me. I guess i never considered Hanks' character to be tormented by a cause or searching for some "reason", I saw him as a character walking through a horrific landscape shellshocked.

he wanted to go home and knew he probably wouldn't ever get to.

something worthwhile. Hence my point that Ryan saved the captain more than the other way around. It is Ryan who forces the Hanks group to stand and fight at the bridge..... thus it is Ryan who saves the day for the good guys.

It makes me wonder if Steven Spielberg was in the Army.

more relevant to current events.

well yeah it was depressing. I don't think the point was to entertain you, maybe you should have seen The Mask of Zorro.

do you not like every movie you find depressing?

...in a PR move. War is hell and all that, but the idea that the Army can order you to lay down their life so they can get some positive ink? Now that's just fucking sad.

at least I just considered that the vehicle. Even if the 7 had been sent to save a puppy in Alsace, the "point" would all be the same - the horror of war.

(picturing the puppy running up to Hanks' dead body - in a true Spielberg ending)

...and the futility of joining the US Army, where you can be expected to nobly lay down your life for a fucking PR move. Then, fifty years on, everyone will talk about how brave and selfless you were, forgetting that your government got you expired so they would have a nice news story everyone forgot about by the end of the week.

i'd say it's more about saving a mother who already has enough grief from having to suffer anymore

...about the Army not needing bad press and the country needing a good story.

with all those body parts flying around . . . .

another technical masterpiece condemned to the dustbin by melodrama

I thought it was a terrific film, marred by the overly sentimental bookends surrounding it.

that the idea (starring Tom Hanks, who is one of us) was to terrify the public as to the horrors of war.

it's one of those movies I see once and I really don't need to see again.

I did appreciate that the war scenes were much more realistic than usual in a movie. Too much glamourization of it normally.

But yeah, it's not one of my faves.

I loved it...quite good as far as realism. The message was good too, in that it did not glamorize war at all.

Sign up to defend your country and end up getting sent into a meatgrinder in order to give the American public a good image of Uncle Sam?

"Gee, I want to do that someday", then I guess the message that I got from it was off the mark. I do not think it was a pro-war movie, no matter how you or anyone else took it.

because it did, in fact, glorify war.

The carnage, the randomness of death, the stupidity of the missions. Please point out how it made it made war out to be a noble pursuit, because I missed that part.

frankly, the scene of the many many crosses in Normandy meant a lot.

I see no reason to resort to arms.

nt

LIVES matter. Any lives that are used up in this war effort are pitifully wasted.

who is crying "momma!" and of course Wade's death is just tragic.

effect. thay were trying to appeal to what we now call "security moms".

respect toward those in WWII. Some parts I didn't like-the obvious sentimentality that Speilberg does so well-but I thought it was good otherwise.

It's obviously an anti-war movie. Anti-military, too, if unintentionally so.

I liked the movie because I believe it probably serves to wake people up to the realities of war, and want to avoid it. That makes it good in my book. And I speak as a person, that became quite fascinated with WWII at a early age. My older sister did a report on hitler, and how he killed so many people. As a child, I pictured a man, black cape and sword, scaling windows and stabbing people to death. It was only a few years later, that I began to learn how it was really accomplished, and that it was an entire nation that took part in the wholesale slaughter of people, and how people could dream of ways to make murder on a large scale, more efficient. The whole concept was disgusting and intriguing for me. It also taught me how to discern propaganda and dangers of unchecked nationalism. Do not get me wrong, I believe we had to fight in WWII, but I learned to hate war and all of its' effects, at a time when many kids I grew up with enjoyed playing wargames.

war is a fucking BAD thing. In all of it's incarnations.

I think that's even more depressing that the futility of the movie, that people think it's a damned tribute to America's fighting men. Which, I suppose it is, in as much as our military seems to regard our soldiers as cannon fodder.

they signed up to fight. they understood the risks.

war is terrible, yes, but sometimes it is absolutely essential and necessary.

world war II is an example of a war that without question had to be fought.

our current war is not.

granted, this is my opinion, and you are more than entitled to yours, but i saw the movie as an unbelievably moving tribute to our fighting men. what i saw in that movie is the most realistic combat i'll ever see my life. seeing the horror and tragedy those guys lived with every day made me love and respect them that much more.

but you disagree...so it goes.

And if you think that treating our men and women as disposable is okay because they weren't drafted, then it seems you didn't gain as much from "Saving Private Ryan" as you might think.

process.

we should have a "department of Peace", not a department of RUMSFIELD.

at what point do we call an end to the slaughter of our young boys and our young girls? Where? If not here, then where?

During World War Two most American Families had someone, or lived next door to a family that had someone fighting overseas. The "PR" from these types of activities was integral in keeping the public at home involved in the ultimate goal. Was such use of these "human interest" stories right or moral? At that time in history, I believe yes. Mrs. Ryan had already payed the ultimate price any woman can be expected to pay for her country. Simplisticly, the ends probably would have justified the means at that moment, and under those circumstances. The crew of the "Memphis Belle" toured the country to show that the Allies were winning. The story depicted in "Private Ryan" would have been used to show the army as "caring" about the Ryan family. Remember, that was a much different time.

I don't think it was that different of a time. I have no trouble believing our modern day Army wouldn't blink at wasting seven guys to get a sympathetic story out of, say, The New York Times.

You probably shouldn't, either.

But I honestly think WW2 is light years away from where we now stand. It is now truly history, and still seems virtuous, if that is at all possible for an undertaking as grotesque as war. I also hope that our military have not wandered so far down the path you see them on that such an action would ever be considered. But then again, as a Met fan, I have seen alot of loser decisions made in my life!!

war porn!

Blood and guts. Body parts. It is what it is.

Saving Private Ryan
Enemy At The Gate
Full Metal Jacket

my favorite war movies

Really gives you a nice understanding of the Russian conflict, they need to make more movies about that because they suffered so much.

Woah, that movie was so sappy and- I don't even know where to begin.

Good fight scenes, good scenery, but from an historical aspect it kinda sucked.

Read the real story of Zaitsev and Konings. You'll find truth is stranger than fiction.

It was a friend's dad, and I'll never forget his comment: "I would have felt safe if there was a blade of grass to hide behind." I couldn't tell if he liked the movie or not, but he was astounded by the reality of the battle scenes.

One of them complained that it was as though WWII got in the way of Ben Affleck getting laid. I damn pissed myself I was laughing so hard.

Those guys were cranky as shit, too, during the non-battle scenes. You haven't lived until you've seen a bunch of eighty year old men heckling a movie like teenaged boys.

This guy was quite the pistol as well. I miss old Walt.

...I woke up and the theater was empty.

It's not one you want to watch all the time, but an important one to see.

It showed the horror of war to a generation who saw war as more of a video game. I studies WWII in school, but SPR made it real in a way it never was before.

I don't see it as a PR stunt at all. One, there was a good chance that many of them would die anyway. It was not a cake walk after D-Day. Two, it gave them a mission that offered more than mere PR - Hope. Three, it is loosely based on the Sullivans a family who lost 5 sons in the war. (My dad says the Sullivans made quite a lot of news - now there is a rule that brothers can't all serve together.)

I think we should all 'Earn this.' We all owe those who preserved our freedom a debt. It's up to us to live lives worthy of such a sacrifice.

Ive grown up on the war games, I play em and love em but I come out anti war, and I do try to save the characters in my games that I can save, I remember in Medal of Honor: Frontline, theres this 82nd airborne private you run in to, you dont have to save him but I always try to save him.

You said it better than I could.

....and the rest of the flick is a run-of-the-mill war picture.

should watch the first 1/2 hour of this movie.

the first 30 minutes really don't adhere to any of the convential movie narratives. Nothing but insanity, confusion, pain, and death. A rendering of warfare that shoots for the visceral. The rest of the picture is just standard issue Speilberg slick hokum.

I thought it gave a very good visualization of war and should be seen for that reason. War is hell and should never ever ever be gone into lightly. ever. Too many people equate war with a video game or romantisize it (Longest Day) and it isn't that way. This movie is the gorriest I've seen.

The PR reason behind the story was stupid. However, our government does these stupid things and wastes our soldiers' lives for these stupid reasons and for that reason people should see it (see what stupidity is done by the government to make "heroes").

(And why does a dead person = a hero? They're dead. We all die. Some of us die for better reasons, some for worse. why does this make you a "hero" ? Sorry, personal rant)

My partner served during the last Gulf War. When we saw Private Ryan I expressed my feelings about the complete stupidity and futility of the mission. My partner said, "The Army does stupid shit for stupid reasons. Wasting seven guys to save one man and a good story? Totally conceivable,"

Dear Lord, how horrible war is.

It just wasn't that good.

i kind of think of it as one of those monoliths of incredibly STUPID and short-sighted though by military command (the general reading that letter at the war department)

not emotion.

The battle scenes are of course, extraordinary for their realism. But the storyline does suffer from too much melodrama. I think ultimately the movie is anti-war but pro-warrior. This kind of message is not lost on thinking people, but there are a lot out there that twist this into a form of jingoism. Some people see this and think that fighting in a war is the patriotic thing to do, made all the more so because it is so horrible as the movie demonstrates.

Spielberg has never exactly been known for making really bold political statements. He may show things like the Holocaust and WWII in a manner that brings home the horror to people, but these topics are still relatively safe. It is politically acceptable to criticize the horror of war and the Nazis. Ultimately Saving Private Ryan didn't make any real bold statements except to say that yes, war really is hell, and yes, those who fight it are truly brave and suffer enormously. He may have taken a few swipes at the Army's public relations mission, but he did so in a very kid-gloves kind of way.

I heard it was long. I'm not into long movies. I couldn't stay awake through any of the Lord of the Rings movies.

If I come out of a film exhausted, it wasn't good.
Duckie

Just sat in the lobby and ate Junior Mints until my family came out. It was the most depressing movie I have ever seen, and I watch a lot of depressing movies!