Saving Private Ryan starts with some of the most horrific and realistic
battle footage ever put on the screen. For the first twenty or so minutes of
the film, the viewer experiences the storming of Omaha
Beach as much like someone who is
there as it is possible without actually being there. As Captain Miller, a
Ranger officer, played by Tom Hanks, fights desperately to survive and to get
off the beach, we see death and fear and horror at every turn. At the end of
that sequence, the viewer feels as exhausted and grateful as if he had been in
the battle and survived.
It is after the Omaha Beach
sequence when the real story begins. It seems that in the space of about two
days, three brothers named Ryan have died in combat. A fourth brother, Private
Ryan of the 101st Airborne Division, is all who is left. And he is somewhere behind
the lines in Normandy. General
Marshal, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, personally orders that the
boy be found and brought home to be a comfort to his mother.
That task falls to Captain Miller and a squad of Rangers, played by, among
others, T0om Sizemore as Miller’s Sergeant, and Vin Diesel. The squad embarks
on a kind of odyssey through war torn France,
all the time wondering why their lives are being put at risk to save just the
life of one. Miller is a man who has seen too much, having fought all the way
from the beginning in North Africa, and has counted the numbers of boys who
have died under his command.
When they finally find Ryan, played by Matt Damon, they find him with
survivors of the airborne unit he was in holding a village against an expected
Nazi attack. He refuses to return with the Rangers to safety and home. “But
your brothers are dead,” he is told. He looks around at his fellow
paratroopers. “These are my brothers,” he replies.