The picture stars Tom Hanks (Apollo 13), Ed Burns (Ash Wednesday) and Tom Sizemore (Paparazzi) among what I consider an all star cast.

I felt the ensemble performances within the eight men of the rescue squad was what made this picture so entertaining. It will take a long time to put an ensemble THIS strong together again.

The special effects, going hand in hand with the picture's production design, was flawless and captured the destruction and the era of the German occupied regions of France depicted throughout the story.

Two time Academy Award® winning cinematographer Januz Kaminski (Schindler's List) raw stock film look makes the picture so much more real than what just sets and costumes could do.

Two time Oscar® winning director Stephen Spielberg's (Catch Me If You Can) care of the subject matter becomes the movie's heart and sole. It is so obvious Spielberg wasn't just a director for hire on this project. It WAS his project, making the movie beyond memorable.

The opening D-DAY sequence is very long, but far from boring. However, it does push off the start of the picture's otherwise two hour screen time.

The only thing I didn't like about "Saving Private Ryan" was the Abe Lincoln letter analogy, since I didn't even get the analogy. I liked it as a cool character thing for the general who read the letter aloud, but why it meant so much to his subordinates to show a change of heart in their faces as to whether or not they should use men and resources to find one soldier. Maybe it just went over my head, but I DO think it was overplayed. Not to big deal though.

Overall, you can't get a better World War II set movie than "Saving Private Ryan." I have yet to see anything come close, and I doubt I will in the remainder of my lifetime.

If you haven't seen it, there's something wrong with you.

Benn - Where's the Humanity?

Arguably the best war movie ever made for its story, action, character development, and emotion, "Saving Private Ryan" is a masterpiece of a motion picture.

The invasion of Normandy was the pivotal moment of the war in Europe and that is where the story begins. Captain Miller, played by Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump) leads a company of men, from the 2nd Rangers, as they land at Omaha Beach at Normandy. The minute the landing plank drops on the beach, half of his men are gunned down in a matter of seconds and he is forced into the water. Eventually he makes it on the beach and leads what left of his group up the beach. The company does break through the beachhead at captures the bunker at the top of the cliff. Of course if you know history you know that. The story then goes to three days later when Capt. Miller is ordered to find a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne, Private Ryan, played by Matt Damon (Bourne Identity), who was lost after the first day of invasion. Ryan's other three brothers were all killed in action so Ryan was being sent home by the Army. So Miller takes a squad of what is left of his company and begins the impossible task of looking for Ryan.

All war movies, with one exception (at least to my knowledge,) are character movies. SPR is by far the best movie of this genre in my generation and I would argue of all time. World War II movies are usually very entertaining in that they have one hero, or a group of hero's and they have to overcome insurmountable odds to get the job done. In the early 1960's the movies were overly patriotic, "The Longest Day," "The Sands of Iwo Jima" are two that come to mind. SPR showed us a different kind of US soldier. To understand what I mean, watch the first fifteen minutes of the movie and you will see two American soldiers shoot two unarmed German soldiers who were surrendering. That we don't see in World War II movies, we do see it in Vietnam movies, but this is not only a scene where Americans are not heroes but villains, in a patriotic way.

Tom Hanks leads this cast and he gives a strong and powerful performance as Captain Miller. We are introduced to him when we see his hand shaking involuntarily on the landing craft and it continues to shake him emotionally to the point where he may have made a decision to take a gun emplacement even though it was not necessary in their best interest but to show that he hasn't lost his nerve in battle. Hanks gives us a different kind of hero, one that shows pain anguish in his decisions even though he knows what he had to do was right. Hanks solidified his role as the best actor of our generation and easily the top five of all time. The rest of the cast is very solid and each has their own interesting tales and each character is well acted.

The most powerful scene in the movie is when the remaining six men of the squad debate on whether or not they should kill a German POW who was captured after they took the gun emplacement which cost the life of one of the men. Edward Burns did a superior job in this scene as well as Hanks and Sizemore. Best scene in the movie.

The action is the best, and when I mean best I should say worst, in any movie that is not a horror movie. The audience introduced to what a "real" war wound looks like, guts hanging out of the soldiers body, limbs blown off, etc. The action was also intense in that even in the movie theater it was loud, confusing, and scary. There are no war movies like this one.

I recommend seeing this movie but be warned that it is difficult to see but it is a very, very good movie and you should see it.