Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan War cannot be faced. It is too dreadful. It is the great emptiness that stands before life, transforms itself into a million shapes of unutterable horror, then returns to mocking silence. It is the nightmare from which we can never awake, because the nightmare is the truth: We die. We die like animals because we are animals. We are all creatures who blindly run until something big and hard hits us and …

…scream, cry for medics, howl, die. As if in a hallucination, we keep thinking there's some kind of logic here, some master key. Over there, it's safe over there. Then over there blows up. For an incredible, endless half hour, Spielberg hurls the viewer into the midst of this inconceivable inferno of twisted metal, shrieking shells and human agony. It is a tour de force, probably the most vivid and visceral war scene ever filmed.