When I first saw the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, I eventually started thinking to myself, "My God, when is this going to stop?" Not because I thought it was bad cinema, but because it kept driving home the point of what it was like, on a very individual level, what it was like to be there (think the quick scene of the guy going back to pick up his own arm that had been blown off - granted, that hopefully never actually happened, but it could have).
Just goes to show how people see things differently. When I saw that scene, all I thought was, "Oh, look, there's an extra with one arm tucked inside his shirt and carrying a plastic fake in his other hand." Most of that film did not look at all realistic to me; in fact, the most realistic thing in the first few minutes with the Normandy landing was the immense noise--you couldn't hear a word anyone was saying.
Generally, however, I was extremely disappointed in that movie after all of the early hoopla over how realisitic it was and how Hanks and the other leading actors had gone through training under military experts to look authenic in their movements. I found most of the movie to be very unrealistic and occasionally historically incorrect, and the patrol rambled about like a flock of sheep.
That said, however, there was
one extremely powerful and moving scene in that movie, at the end of the hand-to-hand combat where the German soldier has the American solder down and is slowly slipping his knife into him. The American begs in a whisper, "No, No!" and the German answers in a whisper, "Shuuush, schlafen, schlafen." ("Shuuush, sleep, sleep,") as though speaking to a child. To me, that was the one really authenic and moving scene in that whole movie, but still not enough to make that film worth seeing.