Unhappy Endings – Saving Private Ryan

This is a top-notch film about WWII, but it’s more than just another war film. Private Ryan opens with the storming of Normandy which is possibly one of the best moments in war film history. Wait, go back, that’s not quite where it starts. It starts with an old man visiting a military graveyard. He stops at a tombstone and as we close in on his face we fade to Tom Hanks. This little trick leads us to believe that Tom Hanks was that old man, more on this later.

After the beach is stormed it is learned that the three brothers of one Private Ryan have died. So now it’s up to Hanks and his team to go into enemy territory, find Ryan and bring him home safe. What follows is a long journey where we get to find out what Hank’s men a really made of. While the movie gets a little inconsistent here, it is, for the most part, still a good movie.

WARNING SPOILERS COMING:

So Hanks and his men finally find Ryan who turns out to be Matt Damon. Only thing is, he doesn’t want to go home, he wants to stay and fight. So they stay and fight and during this fight Tom Hanks dies! We end with a close up on Matt Damon and then we fade back to the old man in the graveyard. It turns out the old man was Matt Damon this whole time and he was visiting Tom Hanks grave! What?

When I first saw this movie I thought, “Wow, man.” Then the more I thought about it the more annoyed I got. It doesn’t make any sense! So basically what Spielberg is telling us is: This whole movie has been Matt Damon’s flashback. Matt Damon, who was in the movie for all of thirty minutes, if that! How the hell would he have known what happened to everyone! Films do this time and time again, putting you in the flashback of a character of things they could not possibly know. Why does this happen? Why does Spielberg pull such a bad, student film move? For a schmaltzy emotionally impacting ending. So that the audience will realize that it was Matt Damon the whole time and the weight of that will hit them and the water works will start flowing. Logic be damned! Then it gets really schmaltzy with shots of American flags and it just makes you proud to be an America, by god!

It’s real simple. Cut the whole old man bit out. It’s completely unnecessary. Just open with Normandy and end with Tom Hanks dying. You still get the complete arc of his character without any contrived emotional bull crap to muck it up. The flashback is just a gimmicky device that Spielberg shouldn’t need to resort to.

Or, if you really need the film to be a flashback: Keep the old man as Tom Hanks. Don’t kill him in the end. However, that idea doesn’t excite me nearly as much. You’d get a very anticlimactic ending that way.

Spielberg is a phenomenal filmmaker when he wants to be, and sometimes he makes Minority Report. But even at his best Spielberg tries too hard for that extra emotional kick, and more often than not that’s what prevents his good movies from being great movies. He really needs to go back and watch Jaws and Raiders Of The Lost Ark to remind him of what made him such a great filmmaker. No more of this War Of The Worlds crap, leave that to the likes of Michael Bay, that way everyone will expect it to be crap.