The Analysis of Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg

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The Analysis of Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg Analyse he methods used to make the opening sequence of ‘Saving

Private Ryan’ both shocking and realistic, and discuss its

effectiveness as an opening to a film

The film ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was released on September 11th 1998;

the film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and was produced by

Paramount pictures along with DreamWorks. Steven Spielberg has

directed many films, such as: Jaws in 1975, Raiders of the Lost Ark in

1981 and Minority Report in 2002. Spielberg had never directed a war

film before, and this one showed that he had the ability to do so. In

1999 the film won five awards including best director justifying his

achievement!

Spielberg had various goals he wanted to reach when he made this

movie. He did not want to just use the World War II as a basis for the

movie; he actually wanted to bring out the realism within the movie,

to make the viewer could see what war was actually like; Spielberg

said ‘‘I wanted to the audience to feel the same as those Green

Recruits’’. The ‘Green Recruits’ were totally new to this whole battle

scene and so they must have felt extremely scared and he really put

this forward in the movie. Also another main challenge for Spielberg

was to make this movie like the stories his father told him about

WWII; he wanted to capture the true horror of war.

The first scene is as James Ryan is walking up towards the grave yard,

he is with his family, but he walks separate from them; this is maybe

because of his bad memories he wanted to be alone in a sense. Then he

walks along past the graveston...

... middle of paper ...

...Saving Private Ryan’ but he is dead so early on.

In conclusion. The opening establishes that war is not glamorous.

Spielberg does this by showing the sorrow of James Ryan by showing

close up shots of his face and as he proceeds to the graves tears fill

his eyes. Also Spielberg uses handheld cameras; this shows how rough

the terrain was and the jolting and jerking of the cameras showed the

difficulty of getting the beach and also the sound as the soldiers

move up the beach is the sound of gattling cannons and artillery fire.

And finally Spielberg achieves all of his goals in this moving by not

storing boarding the feature, him not storyboarding it greatly

contributes to the way the opening sequence goes on, it emphasises the

events and how they can totally go a different way, from winning to

losing and life to death.

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