SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
Though it may seem to be a movie full of unseasonably sadistically depicted violence, Saving Private Ryan is quite an intelectual picture.
In fact, I believe that it is more intelectual than many of those pictures usually described as "intelectual". It may impress larger scale of people rather than impress an individual in an unusual depth. But I don't naturally mean that it is less impressive than raw, severe, brutal and also very true. It affects one in a depth that any other movie of its genre can hardly reach. It makes one's heart bet faster, it makes one's guts swirl and it makes one's head spin.
The part where the Allied invasion force reaches the Omaha beach of French Normandy and unleashes the Overlord operation, is so staggering and dismaying in its intensity, that it pushes you into the seat. The sounds make you shiver and shake and the view makes you feel like part of it. If nothing else, this makes one feel like crying. Seeing everything so real, so nightmarish, pictured so confusingly, one can easily understand those hard minutes, when survival seems to be impossible. You can see how cruelty finds a simple justification, how cruelty loses its moral meaning and becomes a psychological self-defense, ho friends are lost and how a human heart changes into stone, cold and hard, without emotions. It can be seen how a soldier feels and why, but it can hardly be felt - unless you are a soldier with such an experience. Feeling it would brake one's back.
But the invasion sequence is not the only thing that has peculiar effects on one's mind. It is the whole story that is most intriguing and that makes you think really hard of the values we hold sacred and of the number of lives that was lost. It is easy to say that they had to be sacrificed to save lives of others. The soldiers didn't fight because of some divine words like "good", "morality" or "democracy" - they fought because they had to. And they had to because they wanted to save primarily their own lives. And that is definetely not egoistic, we all think similarly in cases like that one shown in Saving Private Ryan, where being a hero amidst of a massacre means to be among the the first ones killed.
WHO IS THIS "PRIVATE RYAN" SUPPOSED TO BE?
There were three of thre of these Ryan brothers. Two of them were reported to be killed in action serving at various Theatres of Operations. Only one of them was left. And he took part in the operation Overlord, at ETO (the European Theatre of Operations).
WHY "SAVING"?
Eight sons of eight mothers were sent to find him and bring him back to his mother, who would otherwise receive three reports of three of her sons killed. Many questions emerge when you think of whether this quest was worth of saving one life, even more pop into one's mind knowing that though one live is saved and the mission accomplished, eight other lives are lost. But it is impossible to judge what would be more cruel, to tell a mother that all of her three sons were killed or to tell a mother that her only son is lost... It is objectively equal - anything of such nature is cruel. And there can't be any objective judgement of what is worse or better - after all, a war cannot be valued by principles that it doesn't accept - by principles, which would make a war (or anything, that preceeded and resulted in this particular conflict) impossible.
THE MOVIE SCRIPT
Unfortunately, this movie is such a new flick that I donīt have a script of it. But as soon as I find it somewhere, I shall put it here for sure.
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