I wonder if anyone else here has had the same experience I have of liking Saving Private Ryan less on second viewing, but getting more out of The Thin Red line on repeat viewings. The opening D-Day scene, though, is an incredible achievement, in that many D-Day survivors interviewed have said that that scene comes much closer than any other war movie to showing what it was really like. Some have said that scene shows exactly what it was like.

The final battle in Ryan has one scene which looks almost identical to documentary footage of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It is when a molotov cocktail is thrown from a window into a German truck carrying soldiers. The angle, results, and the "look" of that particular shot, except for being in color, is otherwise (almost) identical. I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong in doing that, in fact if that documentary footage was what inspired Spielberg to shoot that scene, that's damn good filmmaking.

On the question of whether Tom Hanks's platoon could have in real life held off the Germans in the final battle sequence, who knows, but his men were using some unorthodox guerrilla-like tactics, (for lack of adequate firepower and numbers of men) which could have in real life created chaos and exacted heavy casualties among enemy troops.

Whatever one thinks about S.P. Ryan, it has definitely set a higher standard for realism in war pictures for its opening battle sequence.

chanteyranger