Well, I'm not going to be able to convince any of you, I just liked the way it was so personal. They were a family going out to save one man.
I dunno...I just liked the whole thing.
Jeez, Bob, I wasn't asking you to convert me or even to "defend" your preference for the movie--if you like it, you like it. I just thought you might share some of the reasons you like it. You know, like in a regular discusssion, which there should be more of in this forum.
For instance, one of the things that bothered me was that there was so much hype about how
authentic the film was. Yet in the scene where some of the rangers are sitting at a table looking through dogtags of dead paratroopers, there is a group of what we are told are wounded paratroopers in a field behind them, and sitting there in the midst of those supposedly wounded paratroopers is a black soldier. But the All-American and Screaming Eagle paratroop divisions that jumped into Normandy were not integrated in 1943. There were black paratroopers but they served in segregated units, none of which jumped into Normandy on D-Day. A small thing, yes, but
not authentic!
The studio also made a big thing about Hanks and the other stars spending a couple of weeks in a Hollywood "boot camp" where an ex-soldier was supposed to get them in shape and teach them how an Army unit moves. Well, if there was such a camp, those bozos must have slept through it. I haven't been any closer to combat than any of those actors but I did 3 years in the US Army starting with 8 weeks of basic training back in 1961, and I still remember how one moves using cover and concealment in a combat situation. They instead show one guy taking a
back step from behind cover while talking to the French family right into the gunsight of a Nazi sniper, like there's no war within 100 miles of where he's standing! Ka-pow, and another "veteran ranger" bites the dust!
One thing they told us--and had us practice--was a frontal assualt on a machinegun bunker, which the Army claimed could be done with a
minimum of two rifle teams (I thought they were extremely over-confident even then--I wouldn't want to try it with less than a couple of platoons, and even then you're likely to lose a lot of men). Hanks is down to less than one rifle team when he tries that maneuver early in the film. Miraculously, he knocks out the machinegun but gets his
medic killed in the process! Now why is a medic participating in an assault? His job is to stay back until someone is wounded--that's when he goes to work!
That's just some of the reasons I didn't like that movie. And I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why they sent that green trilingual company clerk along with the beat up rangers to save Pvt. Ryan. I never could figure out what his contribution was supposed to be--was he going to ask the French and Germans if they had seen Ryan???