Saving Private Ryan was a pretty good movie,but it was kind of soured for me when it started the whole "greatest generation" thing.
Like I get that the WWII was the big one, but I don't like the non-stop worship they get compared to other veterans. And SPR was kind sort of Ground Zero off that.
Band of Brothers however was great.
I'm going to assume you're young, because "Greatest Generation" absolutely did not start with Saving Private Ryan, and in fact the movie was noted at the time for showing the soldiers and the conditions of war as completely opposite of heroic.
Edit: Tom Brokaw is the one who coined the phrase, btw.
Fencingsax on
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Saving Private Ryan was a pretty good movie,but it was kind of soured for me when it started the whole "greatest generation" thing.
Like I get that the WWII was the big one, but I don't like the non-stop worship they get compared to other veterans. And SPR was kind sort of Ground Zero off that.
Band of Brothers however was great.
I'm going to assume you're young, because "Greatest Generation" absolutely did not start with Saving Private Ryan, and in fact the movie was noted at the time for showing the soldiers and the conditions of war as completely opposite of heroic.
Edit: Tom Brokaw is the one who coined the phrase, btw.
Yeah, Brokaw's The Greatest Generation book came out the year before, I believe. It was very popular with my library's patrons at the time, who were mostly retirees. Saving Private Ryan definitely contributed to the whole Greatest Generation worship thing, though. It didn't always show them as heroic (i.e. the scene near the beginning where some Americans shoot two surrendering soldiers and mock them), but also felt more realistic compared to a lot of war movies I'd seen up to that point.
Also, holy shit that movie is almost 20 years old.
Saving Private Ryan was a pretty good movie,but it was kind of soured for me when it started the whole "greatest generation" thing.
SPR would have been a much better film if they had cut the sappy Arlington Cemetery bookends.
Regarding the violence in Rambo, it's a very muddled message:
The shock of it is incredible in terms of scale, visceral experience, and, technical achievement, and its the only thing that really makes the movie interesting. Rambo is haunted and sort of broken by violence, but one last big cathartic massacre of Myanmar soldiers is the last push he needs to finally return home? The handsome Brit spends his time protecting the one white woman, and calmly blowing men's heads off. The loudmouthed Brit boasts a lot, gets punked by Rambo, gets his leg blown off, then makes a noble sacrifice. The pacifist missionary gets his whole group killed, and only saves himself with a turn to murder. The Burmese/Myanmar soldiers are all abusers that rape and kill with abandon and that's horrible and bad. The villagers are all screaming helpless victims that will soon die in increasingly insane ways. The rebels are mentioned offhand, then show up like the cavalry at the end, with no names, faces, or beliefs.
What do you take from all that? Is the violence a horrible awful thing that makes demons of us all? Or the noble calling of the few brave men willing to protect the innocent? Or is it badass when white people do it, but not when Southeast Asian people do it? I'm not sure the film thinks about it that deeply.
Saving Private Ryan was a pretty good movie,but it was kind of soured for me when it started the whole "greatest generation" thing.
SPR would have been a much better film if they had cut the sappy Arlington Cemetery bookends.
It was the Normandy cemetary, but, those bookends are the only things that attempt to make the movie anything but the unintentional indictment of war and how the war was fought that it would otherwise be. They are tacked-on sentiment justifying the trading of ten lives for one, for no logistical reason, at a time when those ten lives were worth their weight in gold.
Captain Miller knows that. He makes the little speech during the "shit rolls downhill, not up" bit about what he'd say to a superior officer in regards to the mission. They all know it. Miller straight up says it, "Earn it." How does Ryan earn it? Well, he apparently gets married, has at least one kid, and they have some attractive daughters. And his wife thinks he's a good man. That's it.
Ditch Ryan, have them being sent to Ramelle as a commando squad to help the under-strength unit there and it's ten times better. Not a single thing in the movie needs to be changed besides Ryan being in it. All their sacrifices become heroic, instead of sentimental lunacy.
Or hell, have them sent to Ramelle where they discover Private James Ryan has just recently received notice all his brothers are dead and then they decide on their own this kid is going to live and get back home.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
Or hell, have them sent to Ramelle where they discover Private James Ryan has just recently received notice all his brothers are dead and then they decide on their own this kid is going to live and get back home.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
fk you Spielberg you hack.
:edit: Great minds Doodmann.
Having the mission is a large point of the film, though. The point is that the squad is sent on what amounts to a PR operation because the brass doesn't want a second Sullivan situation on their hands.
I like Saving Private Ryan because it shows how utterly idiotic military leadership can be a times. Kinda like making a platoon of soldiers do a patrol in Afghanistan in the middle of the day to talk to local populace, when every sane afghan is resting because it's 50 fucking degrees celsius. /still mad.
The one bit in Rambo that makes me think it has some kind of message is when the pacifist missionary kills a guy with a rock, invoking Cain and Abel. I'm not sure if it's meant to be "whiny pacifist becomes a real man" or "pacifist becomes a murder." I lean more to the latter, but it's hard to tell.
It's been a long time since I've seen it. But Rambo's core philosophy has always been super tied up with nationalist BS about how we could've won if only those darn weenies back home let us win. First Blood is even the movie that really popularized the "soldiers coming home getting protested and called baby killers" meme, which was not actually really a thing.
And then the later movies are basically re-fighting Vietnam, and this time we win because we're not being weenies about it.
So even without rewatching the movie, I feel pretty safe in thinking it's the "real man" explanation.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Or hell, have them sent to Ramelle where they discover Private James Ryan has just recently received notice all his brothers are dead and then they decide on their own this kid is going to live and get back home.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
fk you Spielberg you hack.
:edit: Great minds Doodmann.
Having the mission is a large point of the film, though. The point is that the squad is sent on what amounts to a PR operation because the brass doesn't want a second Sullivan situation on their hands.
It would've been disastrous PR though. If the War Department plays it up, it comes out they sent ten soldiers, including two seasoned officers who'd successfully fought on multiple continents by that point, to die all so they could save one nobody. If the War Department doesn't play it up, what's the point?
It's manufactured Spielbergian Hollywood garbage. The US sent 125,000 men to their deaths to take Normandy. One guy losing his brothers wouldn't have even been a blip on the Army's radar.
Or hell, have them sent to Ramelle where they discover Private James Ryan has just recently received notice all his brothers are dead and then they decide on their own this kid is going to live and get back home.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
fk you Spielberg you hack.
:edit: Great minds Doodmann.
Having the mission is a large point of the film, though. The point is that the squad is sent on what amounts to a PR operation because the brass doesn't want a second Sullivan situation on their hands.
It would've been disastrous PR though. If the War Department plays it up, it comes out they sent ten soldiers, including two seasoned officers who'd successfully fought on multiple continents by that point, to die all so they could save one nobody. If the War Department doesn't play it up, what's the point?
It's manufactured Spielbergian Hollywood garbage. The US sent 125,000 men to their deaths to take Normandy. One guy losing his brothers wouldn't have even been a blip on the Army's radar.
There's a reason that there is currently in service a US Naval vessel named USS The Sullivans. That story (where the four brothers died together on a Navy ship, wiping that family out) caught the public's attention during the war. The whole point of the mission is to prevent a second one.
Or hell, have them sent to Ramelle where they discover Private James Ryan has just recently received notice all his brothers are dead and then they decide on their own this kid is going to live and get back home.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
fk you Spielberg you hack.
:edit: Great minds Doodmann.
Having the mission is a large point of the film, though. The point is that the squad is sent on what amounts to a PR operation because the brass doesn't want a second Sullivan situation on their hands.
It would've been disastrous PR though. If the War Department plays it up, it comes out they sent ten soldiers, including two seasoned officers who'd successfully fought on multiple continents by that point, to die all so they could save one nobody. If the War Department doesn't play it up, what's the point?
It's manufactured Spielbergian Hollywood garbage. The US sent 125,000 men to their deaths to take Normandy. One guy losing his brothers wouldn't have even been a blip on the Army's radar.
There's a reason that there is currently in service a US Naval vessel named USS The Sullivans. That story (where the four brothers died together on a Navy ship, wiping that family out) caught the public's attention during the war. The whole point of the mission is to prevent a second one.
Five brothers. And the Sole Survivor policy wasn't officially enacted until 1948. And siblings can still serve together, they're just allowed to ask to be split up.
All I'm saying is there were other, better ways to get from point A to point B in SPR and have it be as good if not better besides the one Steven "every movie I make is about a family with issues" Spielberg came up with.
All I'm saying is there were other, better ways to get from point A to point B in SPR and have it be as good if not better besides the one Steven "every movie I make is about a family with issues" Spielberg came up with.
Except then you lose the whole "this team is being sent on a gooseshit mission because the brass has rectocranial inversion" story that's at the heart of the movie (see also: the glider scene).
All I'm saying is there were other, better ways to get from point A to point B in SPR and have it be as good if not better besides the one Steven "every movie I make is about a family with issues" Spielberg came up with.
Except then you lose the whole "this team is being sent on a gooseshit mission because the brass has rectocranial inversion" story that's at the heart of the movie (see also: the glider scene).
"This team is being sent on a gooseshit mission to help defend a bridge in a half-bombed village" works just as well, it gets the characters through every bit of the movie exactly the same way, even leading them to find Ryan, without Ryan being the reason for the movie.
Apparently they're doing a sequel, based on the book sequel. It'll definitely be a TV series, though I don't know if they'll again edit it into a film as well. Haven't heard anything more, though.
Apparently they're doing a sequel, based on the book sequel. It'll definitely be a TV series, though I don't know if they'll again edit it into a film as well. Haven't heard anything more, though.
Das 2t
Not something that makes you any friends on a submarine!
Yes it's dumb to send 10 guys after 1 in the middle of WWII, but does that hurt the quality of the movie? I dont think so. You can dislike that part on a personal level, but there is no need to change it.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
In fact, the whole point is that the bridge is of military significance.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Or hell, have them sent to Ramelle where they discover Private James Ryan has just recently received notice all his brothers are dead and then they decide on their own this kid is going to live and get back home.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
fk you Spielberg you hack.
:edit: Great minds Doodmann.
Having the mission is a large point of the film, though. The point is that the squad is sent on what amounts to a PR operation because the brass doesn't want a second Sullivan situation on their hands.
It would've been disastrous PR though. If the War Department plays it up, it comes out they sent ten soldiers, including two seasoned officers who'd successfully fought on multiple continents by that point, to die all so they could save one nobody. If the War Department doesn't play it up, what's the point?
It's manufactured Spielbergian Hollywood garbage. The US sent 125,000 men to their deaths to take Normandy. One guy losing his brothers wouldn't have even been a blip on the Army's radar.
There's a reason that there is currently in service a US Naval vessel named USS The Sullivans. That story (where the four brothers died together on a Navy ship, wiping that family out) caught the public's attention during the war. The whole point of the mission is to prevent a second one.
Five brothers. And the Sole Survivor policy wasn't officially enacted until 1948. And siblings can still serve together, they're just allowed to ask to be split up.
It wasn't officially enacted, but they did enforce a policy similar.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
My favorite war film is probably The Thin Red Line. Well, it definitely is. The Patriot and Patton are high up there too.
Saving Private Ryan was a pretty good movie,but it was kind of soured for me when it started the whole "greatest generation" thing.
Like I get that the WWII was the big one, but I don't like the non-stop worship they get compared to other veterans. And SPR was kind sort of Ground Zero off that.
Band of Brothers however was great.
WWII was the last war that had "traditionally drawn lines" for people to wax poetic about.
The deification of those folks began long before Saving Private Ryan came about. I'd say they've been hailed as heroes forever, and moreso since Vietnam. Especially when you factor in how strong the Allied propaganda was and the lack of historical understanding of how Hitler actually lost.
jungleroomx on
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Keeping Up With the Joneses (HBO) was decent, could have been a movie that matches what Central Intelligence produced with normies teaming up with l33t spies, but shoots itself in the foot quite a bit. It's pretty odd when Gal Gadot has better comedic timing than Isla Fisher.
Boilerplate story, humdrum couple in nice neighborhood in Atlanta cuz tax credits meet new neighbors who are just great at everything but are spooks and actually looking into the misdoings of a defense company Galifinakis works for (but he just works as HR manager a lulz). New couple befriends old couple, old couple gets suspicious and thinks they're teh evilz, hijinks, ptew ptews.
As a plus, Galifinakis is not normal bearded fat idiot here, and isn't completely aloof dum dum either. The guy actually comes across as an earnest dad character who makes "bad" puns and jokes (that are actually hella 10/10) and is just in over his head. He is genuinely likable for the first time in a movie in forever, this is what the guy should do more of. And Hamm and Gadot do well being the spies and are actually the highlights of the film and should have been the real focus, they play the tired spy banter well, like Chuck and Sarah would be if they got to season 15 or so. But it's the Isla Fisher character that seems to have channeled all the unused crazy energy for her character as opposed to Galifinakis. She's the first one to suspect something about them and just becomes the more gung ho of the couple and you don't have any balance with her and Galifinakis onscreen.
[Sidenote addendum ipso facto: I really used to joke about it at first, but now it's just becoming a pandemic: I don't mind if an actor has an accent. It's fine, throw in a line about it to handwave it away or whatever. Neighbors did this well with Rose Byrne. This movie does so with Gadot saying she's Greek/Israeli. But can we stop having people who can't hide an accent continue to botch faking one? It's been years since I saw it but from what I remember Fisher hid it well in Wedding Crashers, yet here some of the first words out of her mouth have an Aussie accent breaking through to where I thought it would come into play about the character but nope. And it just breaks through so much in the movie that one of the main jobs of an actor is not being fulfilled in this agreement. Noice. Kaar. Droiver. Classifoyed. A pox of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins on you all. ADR is right there yo.]
It's not a bad movie, I suspect it failing at the box office is more to do with people expecting it to be another dumb Galifinakis acts weird for no reason movie. There are some legit chuckles and it passes the time with nice cameos from supporting actors, it's just not something you would pay to see. On streaming it might get a decent following and do better but if you haven't seen Central Intelligence watch that first.
I read an interesting article about 5 years ago talking about my generation's wartime experiences comparing it to WWII's. The thrust of the article is that modern veterans are almost unrelatable to the general public because of the extremely low percentage of those with direct or indirect (i.e. immediate family members) military experience. IIRC the numbers were something like 5% in WWII and .01% today. My maternal grandfather was a marine in WWII with a tremendous amount of combat experience to include 3 purple hearts: the last of which was from a grenade that he attempted to throw back. The man was a hero to me and largely contributed in my own decision to join and stay in the military. He loved SPR saying it was the most realistic portrayal of WWII he'd ever seen. He also hated The Thin Red Line calling the actors' portrayals unrealistic for their attitudes and demeanor. The man wasn't a film critic by any stretch, but his personal experiences really lent a lot of weight to my enjoyment of both of those movies.
Or hell, have them sent to Ramelle where they discover Private James Ryan has just recently received notice all his brothers are dead and then they decide on their own this kid is going to live and get back home.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
fk you Spielberg you hack.
:edit: Great minds Doodmann.
Having the mission is a large point of the film, though. The point is that the squad is sent on what amounts to a PR operation because the brass doesn't want a second Sullivan situation on their hands.
It would've been disastrous PR though. If the War Department plays it up, it comes out they sent ten soldiers, including two seasoned officers who'd successfully fought on multiple continents by that point, to die all so they could save one nobody. If the War Department doesn't play it up, what's the point?
It's manufactured Spielbergian Hollywood garbage. The US sent 125,000 men to their deaths to take Normandy. One guy losing his brothers wouldn't have even been a blip on the Army's radar.
There were tons of sentimental decisions made during the war though. Monument Men (the movie) doesn't do justice to the whole of that operation but it's still based on true events. Kyoto was spared bombing due to the personal connection from the US Secretary of War. Those were strategic decisions with expansive consequences, and I'm certain they existed on many smaller personal levels too. My own experiences in Afghanistan are certainly full of them: we sent fathers home so they could witness their children's births. Part of the reason that SPR is such a powerful movie is because of the context it is in. Without that they're simply GIs, with all the sentimentality of any other government purchased and owned equipment.
All I'm saying is there were other, better ways to get from point A to point B in SPR and have it be as good if not better besides the one Steven "every movie I make is about a family with issues" Spielberg came up with.
Except then you lose the whole "this team is being sent on a gooseshit mission because the brass has rectocranial inversion" story that's at the heart of the movie (see also: the glider scene).
"This team is being sent on a gooseshit mission to help defend a bridge in a half-bombed village" works just as well, it gets the characters through every bit of the movie exactly the same way, even leading them to find Ryan, without Ryan being the reason for the movie.
I have to completely disagree, sending a unit to go get Ryan serves a lot of purposes, ranging from showing that orders can be absurdly stupid to spending a lot of time showing a variety of human reactions to having to fulfill that sort of order. Not to mention that it really hammers home the cost of the war when they find Ryan and tell him all his brothers are dead and he's the last one left. Throw in that contrasting with the attitude of the veteran soldiers and their willingness to write off Ryan because they don't know him and replacing Ryan with the bridge as the objective has no impact.
Plus, sending a unit to go defend a bridge seemingly in the middle of nowhere is completely standard military stuff and wouldn't be significant at all; when you get down to something the size of an average infantry squad, they aren't exactly going to be given much in the way of details. "Go hold this spot, you don't need to know why" is a pretty normal thing at that level. Hell, even if it was important for them to know why to hold the bridge they might not even know.
I know we're all in the middle of seeing big flashy blockbusters every weekend, but please, take a moment and consider seeing something a little more low-key instead. Consider The Big Sick, which I suppose could be called a romcom, but that term carries a lot of baggage with it that would do a disservice to the clever, humorous, affecting, and genuine moments that this film is full of. It stars Kumail Nanjiani, and is a lightly fictionalized account of real events that occurred in his life. I laughed and cried during the film, which is more than can be said about anything else I've watched this summer.
All I'm saying is there were other, better ways to get from point A to point B in SPR and have it be as good if not better besides the one Steven "every movie I make is about a family with issues" Spielberg came up with.
Except then you lose the whole "this team is being sent on a gooseshit mission because the brass has rectocranial inversion" story that's at the heart of the movie (see also: the glider scene).
"This team is being sent on a gooseshit mission to help defend a bridge in a half-bombed village" works just as well, it gets the characters through every bit of the movie exactly the same way, even leading them to find Ryan, without Ryan being the reason for the movie.
I have to completely disagree, sending a unit to go get Ryan serves a lot of purposes, ranging from showing that orders can be absurdly stupid to spending a lot of time showing a variety of human reactions to having to fulfill that sort of order. Not to mention that it really hammers home the cost of the war when they find Ryan and tell him all his brothers are dead and he's the last one left. Throw in that contrasting with the attitude of the veteran soldiers and their willingness to write off Ryan because they don't know him and replacing Ryan with the bridge as the objective has no impact.
Plus, sending a unit to go defend a bridge seemingly in the middle of nowhere is completely standard military stuff and wouldn't be significant at all; when you get down to something the size of an average infantry squad, they aren't exactly going to be given much in the way of details. "Go hold this spot, you don't need to know why" is a pretty normal thing at that level. Hell, even if it was important for them to know why to hold the bridge they might not even know.
Ryan is a McGuffin. Finding him is inconsequential to the plot. They could've made it to Ramelle and someone went "Oh that guy died two days ago" and nothing about the movie would've changed. The actual movie is about Captain Miller and the men in his squad, the way the war has affected them differently, and how they're each dealing with situations as they arise. Anything that gives them a reason to leave Omaha Beach after the landing and trudge 30 miles through the French countryside encountering adversity and tragedy along the way to a bombed out village creates the same movie. The present-day Ryan bookends are unnecessary emotional blackmail. They're Spielberg thinking he needs an old man to fall down in a cemetery to connect with the audience.
There would be less of an argument to be made if Spielberg hadn't almost immediately gone and made Band of Brothers in the exact same style but with an actual true story that contained none of the sentimental pap while being a superior product.
All I'm saying is there were other, better ways to get from point A to point B in SPR and have it be as good if not better besides the one Steven "every movie I make is about a family with issues" Spielberg came up with.
Except then you lose the whole "this team is being sent on a gooseshit mission because the brass has rectocranial inversion" story that's at the heart of the movie (see also: the glider scene).
"This team is being sent on a gooseshit mission to help defend a bridge in a half-bombed village" works just as well, it gets the characters through every bit of the movie exactly the same way, even leading them to find Ryan, without Ryan being the reason for the movie.
I have to completely disagree, sending a unit to go get Ryan serves a lot of purposes, ranging from showing that orders can be absurdly stupid to spending a lot of time showing a variety of human reactions to having to fulfill that sort of order. Not to mention that it really hammers home the cost of the war when they find Ryan and tell him all his brothers are dead and he's the last one left. Throw in that contrasting with the attitude of the veteran soldiers and their willingness to write off Ryan because they don't know him and replacing Ryan with the bridge as the objective has no impact.
Plus, sending a unit to go defend a bridge seemingly in the middle of nowhere is completely standard military stuff and wouldn't be significant at all; when you get down to something the size of an average infantry squad, they aren't exactly going to be given much in the way of details. "Go hold this spot, you don't need to know why" is a pretty normal thing at that level. Hell, even if it was important for them to know why to hold the bridge they might not even know.
Ryan is a McGuffin. Finding him is inconsequential to the plot. They could've made it to Ramelle and someone went "Oh that guy died two days ago" and nothing about the movie would've changed. The actual movie is about Captain Miller and the men in his squad, the way the war has affected them differently, and how they're each dealing with situations as they arise. Anything that gives them a reason to leave Omaha Beach after the landing and trudge 30 miles through the French countryside encountering adversity and tragedy along the way to a bombed out village creates the same movie. The present-day Ryan bookends are unnecessary emotional blackmail. They're Spielberg thinking he needs an old man to fall down in a cemetery to connect with the audience.
There would be less of an argument to be made if Spielberg hadn't almost immediately gone and made Band of Brothers in the exact same style but with an actual true story that contained none of the sentimental pap while being a superior product.
I disagree. The bookends are a deliberate misdirection regarding the fate of Captain Miller - showing the (at that point unknown) old man at the start indicates that Miller survives since the movie is almost entirely focused on him.
Ryan is also not inconsequential as a character either, as he initially refuses to be extracted - even after learning that (and almost starting a fight because of) two of Miller's squad died just to reach him.
Ryan never understands why these men (including, eventually, Miller) are thrown away just to rescue him. Even at the final cemetery scene, he never knew Captain Miller to mourn his death as a person - if anyone is being blackmailed, it is Ryan with the guilt he still carries after all these years. "Tell me I'm a good man!"
Posts
It would explain a lot.
I'm going to assume you're young, because "Greatest Generation" absolutely did not start with Saving Private Ryan, and in fact the movie was noted at the time for showing the soldiers and the conditions of war as completely opposite of heroic.
Edit: Tom Brokaw is the one who coined the phrase, btw.
Yeah, Brokaw's The Greatest Generation book came out the year before, I believe. It was very popular with my library's patrons at the time, who were mostly retirees. Saving Private Ryan definitely contributed to the whole Greatest Generation worship thing, though. It didn't always show them as heroic (i.e. the scene near the beginning where some Americans shoot two surrendering soldiers and mock them), but also felt more realistic compared to a lot of war movies I'd seen up to that point.
Also, holy shit that movie is almost 20 years old.
My Backloggery
Regarding the violence in Rambo, it's a very muddled message:
What do you take from all that? Is the violence a horrible awful thing that makes demons of us all? Or the noble calling of the few brave men willing to protect the innocent? Or is it badass when white people do it, but not when Southeast Asian people do it? I'm not sure the film thinks about it that deeply.
It was the Normandy cemetary, but, those bookends are the only things that attempt to make the movie anything but the unintentional indictment of war and how the war was fought that it would otherwise be. They are tacked-on sentiment justifying the trading of ten lives for one, for no logistical reason, at a time when those ten lives were worth their weight in gold.
Captain Miller knows that. He makes the little speech during the "shit rolls downhill, not up" bit about what he'd say to a superior officer in regards to the mission. They all know it. Miller straight up says it, "Earn it." How does Ryan earn it? Well, he apparently gets married, has at least one kid, and they have some attractive daughters. And his wife thinks he's a good man. That's it.
Ditch Ryan, have them being sent to Ramelle as a commando squad to help the under-strength unit there and it's ten times better. Not a single thing in the movie needs to be changed besides Ryan being in it. All their sacrifices become heroic, instead of sentimental lunacy.
Then you get to keep the realistic war and the sentimental stuff.
fk you Spielberg you hack.
:edit: Great minds Doodmann.
Having the mission is a large point of the film, though. The point is that the squad is sent on what amounts to a PR operation because the brass doesn't want a second Sullivan situation on their hands.
It's been a long time since I've seen it. But Rambo's core philosophy has always been super tied up with nationalist BS about how we could've won if only those darn weenies back home let us win. First Blood is even the movie that really popularized the "soldiers coming home getting protested and called baby killers" meme, which was not actually really a thing.
And then the later movies are basically re-fighting Vietnam, and this time we win because we're not being weenies about it.
So even without rewatching the movie, I feel pretty safe in thinking it's the "real man" explanation.
It would've been disastrous PR though. If the War Department plays it up, it comes out they sent ten soldiers, including two seasoned officers who'd successfully fought on multiple continents by that point, to die all so they could save one nobody. If the War Department doesn't play it up, what's the point?
It's manufactured Spielbergian Hollywood garbage. The US sent 125,000 men to their deaths to take Normandy. One guy losing his brothers wouldn't have even been a blip on the Army's radar.
There's a reason that there is currently in service a US Naval vessel named USS The Sullivans. That story (where the four brothers died together on a Navy ship, wiping that family out) caught the public's attention during the war. The whole point of the mission is to prevent a second one.
Five brothers. And the Sole Survivor policy wasn't officially enacted until 1948. And siblings can still serve together, they're just allowed to ask to be split up.
Except then you lose the whole "this team is being sent on a gooseshit mission because the brass has rectocranial inversion" story that's at the heart of the movie (see also: the glider scene).
My Backloggery
"This team is being sent on a gooseshit mission to help defend a bridge in a half-bombed village" works just as well, it gets the characters through every bit of the movie exactly the same way, even leading them to find Ryan, without Ryan being the reason for the movie.
Das 2t
go get the one kid this family has left is clearly only about the pr and sentiment etc.
Not something that makes you any friends on a submarine!
It wasn't officially enacted, but they did enforce a policy similar.
Watch the trailer here:
https://www.criterion.com/films/29061-the-lure/
(All kinds of NSFW)
WWII was the last war that had "traditionally drawn lines" for people to wax poetic about.
The deification of those folks began long before Saving Private Ryan came about. I'd say they've been hailed as heroes forever, and moreso since Vietnam. Especially when you factor in how strong the Allied propaganda was and the lack of historical understanding of how Hitler actually lost.
Boilerplate story, humdrum couple in nice neighborhood in Atlanta cuz tax credits meet new neighbors who are just great at everything but are spooks and actually looking into the misdoings of a defense company Galifinakis works for (but he just works as HR manager a lulz). New couple befriends old couple, old couple gets suspicious and thinks they're teh evilz, hijinks, ptew ptews.
As a plus, Galifinakis is not normal bearded fat idiot here, and isn't completely aloof dum dum either. The guy actually comes across as an earnest dad character who makes "bad" puns and jokes (that are actually hella 10/10) and is just in over his head. He is genuinely likable for the first time in a movie in forever, this is what the guy should do more of. And Hamm and Gadot do well being the spies and are actually the highlights of the film and should have been the real focus, they play the tired spy banter well, like Chuck and Sarah would be if they got to season 15 or so. But it's the Isla Fisher character that seems to have channeled all the unused crazy energy for her character as opposed to Galifinakis. She's the first one to suspect something about them and just becomes the more gung ho of the couple and you don't have any balance with her and Galifinakis onscreen.
[Sidenote addendum ipso facto: I really used to joke about it at first, but now it's just becoming a pandemic: I don't mind if an actor has an accent. It's fine, throw in a line about it to handwave it away or whatever. Neighbors did this well with Rose Byrne. This movie does so with Gadot saying she's Greek/Israeli. But can we stop having people who can't hide an accent continue to botch faking one? It's been years since I saw it but from what I remember Fisher hid it well in Wedding Crashers, yet here some of the first words out of her mouth have an Aussie accent breaking through to where I thought it would come into play about the character but nope. And it just breaks through so much in the movie that one of the main jobs of an actor is not being fulfilled in this agreement. Noice. Kaar. Droiver. Classifoyed. A pox of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins on you all. ADR is right there yo.]
It's not a bad movie, I suspect it failing at the box office is more to do with people expecting it to be another dumb Galifinakis acts weird for no reason movie. There are some legit chuckles and it passes the time with nice cameos from supporting actors, it's just not something you would pay to see. On streaming it might get a decent following and do better but if you haven't seen Central Intelligence watch that first.
I read an interesting article about 5 years ago talking about my generation's wartime experiences comparing it to WWII's. The thrust of the article is that modern veterans are almost unrelatable to the general public because of the extremely low percentage of those with direct or indirect (i.e. immediate family members) military experience. IIRC the numbers were something like 5% in WWII and .01% today. My maternal grandfather was a marine in WWII with a tremendous amount of combat experience to include 3 purple hearts: the last of which was from a grenade that he attempted to throw back. The man was a hero to me and largely contributed in my own decision to join and stay in the military. He loved SPR saying it was the most realistic portrayal of WWII he'd ever seen. He also hated The Thin Red Line calling the actors' portrayals unrealistic for their attitudes and demeanor. The man wasn't a film critic by any stretch, but his personal experiences really lent a lot of weight to my enjoyment of both of those movies.
There were tons of sentimental decisions made during the war though. Monument Men (the movie) doesn't do justice to the whole of that operation but it's still based on true events. Kyoto was spared bombing due to the personal connection from the US Secretary of War. Those were strategic decisions with expansive consequences, and I'm certain they existed on many smaller personal levels too. My own experiences in Afghanistan are certainly full of them: we sent fathers home so they could witness their children's births. Part of the reason that SPR is such a powerful movie is because of the context it is in. Without that they're simply GIs, with all the sentimentality of any other government purchased and owned equipment.
Ok, now that that oversight has been resolved, this thread can continue.
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Just ... no.
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Alright then, 5 out of 6.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I have to completely disagree, sending a unit to go get Ryan serves a lot of purposes, ranging from showing that orders can be absurdly stupid to spending a lot of time showing a variety of human reactions to having to fulfill that sort of order. Not to mention that it really hammers home the cost of the war when they find Ryan and tell him all his brothers are dead and he's the last one left. Throw in that contrasting with the attitude of the veteran soldiers and their willingness to write off Ryan because they don't know him and replacing Ryan with the bridge as the objective has no impact.
Plus, sending a unit to go defend a bridge seemingly in the middle of nowhere is completely standard military stuff and wouldn't be significant at all; when you get down to something the size of an average infantry squad, they aren't exactly going to be given much in the way of details. "Go hold this spot, you don't need to know why" is a pretty normal thing at that level. Hell, even if it was important for them to know why to hold the bridge they might not even know.
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Ryan is a McGuffin. Finding him is inconsequential to the plot. They could've made it to Ramelle and someone went "Oh that guy died two days ago" and nothing about the movie would've changed. The actual movie is about Captain Miller and the men in his squad, the way the war has affected them differently, and how they're each dealing with situations as they arise. Anything that gives them a reason to leave Omaha Beach after the landing and trudge 30 miles through the French countryside encountering adversity and tragedy along the way to a bombed out village creates the same movie. The present-day Ryan bookends are unnecessary emotional blackmail. They're Spielberg thinking he needs an old man to fall down in a cemetery to connect with the audience.
There would be less of an argument to be made if Spielberg hadn't almost immediately gone and made Band of Brothers in the exact same style but with an actual true story that contained none of the sentimental pap while being a superior product.
Ryan is also not inconsequential as a character either, as he initially refuses to be extracted - even after learning that (and almost starting a fight because of) two of Miller's squad died just to reach him.
Ryan never understands why these men (including, eventually, Miller) are thrown away just to rescue him. Even at the final cemetery scene, he never knew Captain Miller to mourn his death as a person - if anyone is being blackmailed, it is Ryan with the guilt he still carries after all these years. "Tell me I'm a good man!"