Film Analysis of Saving Private Ryan and It's Depiction
The D-Day landings were a significant event in history, so significant
that two films have been made about it. The first one is The Longest
Day directed by Darryl Zanuck in the 1960s and the second one is
Saving Private Ryan directed by Steven Spielberg in the 1990s. AS
these films were made in different decades the audiences expectations
and tolerances of films differ considerably. The aim of Spielberg was
to shock audiences from the very beginning of the film whereas the
D-Day landings don’t feature until an hour into the film, The Longest
Day is more informative than Saving Private Ryan as it features actual
news reel and documentary.
One of the first opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan is at sea and
shows soldiers preparing for battle on the landing craft, we see
scared, pale faces, people being sick and people making religious
signs, they are all about to face the reality that awaits them. This
scene is quite significant because although we see the scared soldiers
one thing we can’t see are their families and the fear that they are
going through thinking about their loved ones at war.
When the soldiers charge off the landing craft and into the sea there
is chaos, there is the sound of the guns, the waves of the sea
crashing against the boats and the shouts of the soldiers in pain. To
enhance the confusion the camera movement is past panning. Spielberg
also includes shots above the sea and below it. Above the sea we see
soldiers fighting for their lives below it we see the ones who aren’t
as lucky.
Every characters pain seems to be represented in one persons screa...
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...as not
being so bad when in the present day we know that it was.
In one way I think that The Longest Day is better than Saving Private
Ryan because Zanuck shows all sides of the war and it makes us realise
that the Germans went through exactly the same as the British and that
they lost soldiers too, if Saving Private Ryan was to do the same it
would be a better film. Both the films are good at showing the war
especially as The Longest Day shows some actual footage of the events.
If The Longest Day was to come out at cinemas now I can safely say
that it wouldn’t be successful and if there was the technology to make
Saving Private Ryan in the 1960s it wouldn’t have been shown because
it would have made the audiences violently sick. This concludes that
both the films are good, but only at the time they were made.