Spielberg unspools war in all its gruesome reality

Actor Tom Hanks also believes in the value of the movie’s graphic horror: “It is gruesome because war is.”

“When I was a kid and saw war movies like `The Dirty Dozen’ and `The Great Escape,’ we immediately went outside and played our version of the same movie,” Hanks recounts. “I don’t think many kids are going to go out and play Saving Private Ryan,” he says.

In an opening sequence that is almost half-an-hour long Spielberg shows a US squadron slowly and agonizingly advancing on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

As they plow forward in a deafening tumult ofartillery, bodies are shredded and limbs torn off by a hail of steel as the sea turns red with blood.

The film, which runs almost three hours, ends with another long battle among the ruins of the fictional French town of Ramelle as US soldiers try to stop German tanks from taking over a bridge.

The story that unfolds between these two scenes of bravery follows eight US soldiers whose mission is to save from behind German lines another soldier, James Ryan, whose three brothers were killed in recent fighting.

Spielberg approached the film almost like a documentary, “Assuming the role of a combat cameraman, not assuming the role of an artist,” he said.

He muted colors and directed his cinematographers to shoot from the shoulder for a greater sense of documentary.

For the film’s stars, fiction became reality as the eight main actors underwent 10 days of intensive military training — a form of boot camp — under the command of former Marine captain Dale Dye, a consultant to the film.

Addressing themby their characters’ names, Dye forced the actors on cold night marches through mud with 40-kilogram (88-pound) packs on their backs.

The training almost sparked a mutiny among the actors, and Hanks had to use all his power and prestige to persuade his comrades to slog through to the end of the training.

The payoff has been a raft of excellent reviews. Daily Variety called the movie “an amazing piece of pure, visceral cinema, akin to a great silent film, in which the words are basically superfluous.”

Entertainment Weekly called it “a masterpiece of terror, chaos, blood and courage” while the Los Angeles Times said, “Saving Private Ryan is as much an experience we live through as a film we watch on screen.”

“This film simply looks at war as if war had not been looked at before,” said the New York Times.

But because of the sheer horror of war it depicts — producer Ian Bryce admitted to the New York Times audiences may not be “ready for that kind of graphic detail” — Spielberghas undertaken a national tour to promote his movie for the first time in 17 years.

“The reason I’m going across the country on this one is to warn parents and young people that this film may not be their cup of tea. I have a real responsibility to do that, especially because of the first 24 minutes of this film,” he told the Los Angeles Times. But he said he was optimistic that the public would welcome the film. “Put it this way: I’m as pleased as I’ve ever allowed myself to be.”