Saving Private Ryan

Enemy: A Study of the Subconscious Mind Dennis Villeneuve's Enemy (2014) takes us on a journey through the subconscious mind of a man in the midst of an identity crisis. Jake Gyllenhaal knocks it out of the park with two stellar performances - playing Adam Bell, a mild-mannered history professor and his doppelgänger, Anthony Claire, a suave, self-centered actor. In contrast to Villeneuve and Gyllenhaal's earlier collaboration and mainstream success Prisoners (2013), Enemy relies on symbolism…

Spec Ops: The Line is about the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker, who is accompanied by a Delta Force team to locate a deserted United States Army colonel John Konrad and other survivors from the ruins of post-cataclysm Dubai for subsequent extraction. To accomplish this goal, the player must traverse the city to neutralize enemy threats and natural disasters. As the player progresses, more and more, the theme begins to change as they spiral into madness. The video presented is the ending of…

The films Taxi to the Dark Side and The Hurt Locker are two films that depict the military and war. Both are centered around the Iraq War, where the United States invaded parts of the Middle East. Both films attempt to describe life as a soldier and the requirements of military life in dangerous situations. While The Hurt Locker is designed as a thriller, Taxi to the Dark Side acts as a documentary. These contrasting genres offer differing views of life in the military during a recent military…

human life. People feel the need to glorify it, in order to process it, to be able to justify it. This is normally done by incorporating fictional characters perusing heroic deeds to distract from the true terror. In the World War II drama, Saving Private Ryan produced in 1998, this film also falls prey to the necessity…

Passchendaele is a Canadian war film portraying the life from the perspective of a soldier. Sergeant Michael Dunne was in the Battle of Vimy Ridge, where he was wounded and sent home as a neurasthenia patient. While being treated, he falls in love with his nurse, Sarah Mann. David Mann, Sarah’s younger brother, decided to ask his girlfriend, Cassie Walker, father’s permission to marry her, but gets rejected in front of a crowd as he is not in the military. He is told that he must be enlisted to…

Passionately directed by Steven Spielberg, “Bridge of Spies” doesn’t belong to those conventional espionage thrillers we normally come across with. The film, which recreates a laudable true story, counts with brilliant performances by Tom Hanks, Spielberg’s habitual first choice, and the highly praised English stage actor Mark Rylance whose brief appearances and words are simply unforgettable. The script by the Coen brothers and Matt Charman, despite lacking vigorous action scenes, reveals a…

Steven Spielberg’s hugely successful film War-Horse, based off a 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo, was nominated for and won numerous awards. It describes the journeys of young farm boy Albert and his beloved horse Joey during the perilous time period surrounding World War I. The TV movie The Lost Battalion, while it did not receive nearly the same level of recognition as Spielberg’s work, is still an impressive drama that portrays the historical events of Major Charles Whittlesey’s 800-men…

Few film directors of the modern era have had such a marked influence on their peers as the great Steven Spielberg. Before Spielberg, it was believed that a filmmaker could either be highly creative or make films that were highly profitable. Usually a person could not accomplish both feats, at least in the same film. Also, when a director created a successful film, he or she was usually stuck creating works in that genre for the rest of his or her career. Spielberg was the first person to…

The Longest Day VS Saving Private Ryan Over the past few weeks we’ve watched several movies pertaining to different historical battles and wars that have changed our world over time. Two movies that we recently spent time watching were The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan. Both of these films depicted D-Day which occurred during World War II. Throughout this essay I will compare and contrast the two films. Some of the differences include: the movies effects as well as their storylines. Some…

Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg, depicts war, especially World War II, in a brutally honest fashion. The Omaha Beach landing scene is emblematic of this brutal honesty. This roughly thirty-minute excerpt is both an exemplary bit of cinema and a largely faithful re-enactment of an historical event. The power of this scene’s soundtrack lies in the fact that it does not even exist. There is literally no background music whatsoever to play with the audience’s emotions. Instead the…