Saving Private Ryan
...ure why he was being told this. Then the worst part came. He was ordered to try to find the one remaining Ryan brother. No one was sure where he was or if he was even alive. He was told of an earlier incident where three brothers from Iowa had all been killed in the war and the mother was left alone. The United States army was now ready to risk the lived of Captain Miller and seven of his men to try and save this one man just so his mother wouldn’t have to lose her only remaining son. To Captain Miller this seemed a little extreme. Think of our mothers thought Miller and his men. They had no choice though, they were under orders. Along the way Millers company would stop by another American base to pick up an American soldier to translate to the German civilians they would meet along the way. They traveled to may abandoned and demolished remains of what used to be towns in search of Private Ryan. Miller lost many of his men along the way during encounters with German paratroopers and hidden German machine gun nests. But despite loosing many men they were able to continue. The met remaining parts of an American Paratrooping unit along the way to somewhat replenish their forces. But the paratroopers weren’t in much better shape than Millers bunch. They continued in search of Ryan and finally found him in a town on the river. He was in a patchwork infantry trying to prevent the Germans from taking a bridge that was vital to the strategies of the United States Army. Private Ryan wouldn’t leave with Miller though, he insisted on staying and fighting the Germans. He didn’t want to be remembered as a coward. Miller agreed, and his men, battered and beaten, also agreed to stay and fight one last fight before going home. They managed to hold off the German advances until help arrived. They again lost many men in this effort but Private Ryan survived. Captain Miller has reached his goal and Ryan would make it home. I thought this was a very good book. I thought it made a very good point about some of the difficult decisions facing the men in the middle of a hostile environment in another country and the bravery shown by many men in the heat of battle. I can’t say if I were placed in the same position if I would be able to do the same thing as some of those men. To risk the lives of several men to save the life of one is a very difficult decision to make. Especially when no one even knew if Private Ryan had even made it off the beach alive or if he was killed in battle. I believe that if I were one of the men with the mission of saving one man just because his the U.S. Army didn’t want to tell his mother, I would have a serious problem with obeying those orders. In critiquing Steven Spielberg’s movie Saving Private Ryan, I realized that you can not base a move only on realism. A good movie has got to have some kind of character or formalism to carry the viewer through these realistic scenes. Spielberg not only uses these tools but also showed stereotyped images in his characters. In my critique I wish to point out some uses of realism, formalism, and stereotypes in the movie Saving Private Ryan. In my eyes Saving Private Ryan is a masterpiece. Even though the movie is nearly three hours in length, it is evenly distributed and takes on a powerful subject. Private Ryan wasn’t merely another war movie, I really felt it caught the soul of war. The film begins with a half-hour sequence of the landings at Normandy on D-Day. Many films have portrayed this D-Day scene, but have failed to me in realism. In Private Ryan, realism portrayed in a nearly exact replica of war. To achieve this Steven Spielberg displayed the battle scenes, as the next step could be the moment of death. Limbs are blown off in mid-shot; guts splay out of uniforms and onto the sandy beach; soldier in mid-sentence are startled by bullet holes blossoming on their foreheads. Bloods sticks to the lens of the camera. In doing so Spielberg mastered the opening of Sav...