When Ryan first hit theaters, discussion of Spielberg’s success at raising the bar for cinematic depictions of combat drowned out nearly all other issues related to the film as a macabre compliment to its unprecedented ultrarealism, many veterans were reported to have re-experienced psychological trauma while watching the 24-minute D-Day sequence that is the pinnacle of that ultra-realism. If anything from Saving Private Ryan endures in the collective consciousness, it’s the overwhelmingly chaotic and graphic recreation of D-Day. But there are still certain Spielberg films that I cannot abide, that continually remind me that there was indeed something substantive to my once unmitigated antipathy toward everything “Spielbergian.” One of those films is Saving Private Ryan.ĭespite the enormous attention it received at the time of its release in 1998, on its own Ryan is finally a forgettable war movie and prestige picture. Artificial Intelligence (a film I had nearly boycotted out of allegiance to Stanley Kubrick) did I reconsider my position. Only in the last several years, and especially after watching for the first time A.I.
He became the exemplar of everything that was syrupy and compromising and escapist-everything that was wrong-about commercial filmmaking. But at a certain point-around the time I decided to become serious about movies-I began to hate Spielberg. and the Indiana Jones films and even-as I got a little older- Schindler’s List. Of course, I grew up on his output, on E.T. I myself have relatively recently come around to appreciating Spielberg. Yet even now to talk about a “Spielbergian” brand of moviemaking or Spielberg himself is still to put into play a host of reductive associations and impressions: for many he is a visionary as much as a calculating businessman, for others a heart-string-tugger as much as chance-taker, and-for almost all, I would venture-the embodiment of the Hollywood juggernaut in both its worst and best aspects and machinations. The last decade-plus of Steven Spielberg’s career has resolutely proven that there is no longer any set definition for “Spielbergian.” Steven Spielberg has for a while been no mere mastermind of blockbuster entertainment, but instead a filmmaker of thrilling and maddening diversity, one able to make The Adventures of Tintin as personal a film as War Horse, Munich, Jurassic Park, Empire of the Sun, and-egad- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Michael Joshua Rowin on Saving Private Ryan
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