Ryan bets the farm on its opening Omaha Beach sequence--instantly famous as the most harrowing portrait of battle in movie history. No question it's intense--hectic but amazingly detailed; the turmoil and clatter never let up. Yet there's often an appalling disjunction between the chaotic slaughter being re-created and the ostentation of the virtuoso filmmaking on display, bragging up distractingly showy effects (the blood flowering from the men shot underwater) when it isn't indulging in pat ironies (the soldier who catches a bullet in the head while marveling at his narrow escape)...

One reason the onscreen debates about the mission's value go in such circles is that the down-to-earth answer to the movie's big question--is one man's life worth risking eight?--is so screamingly obvious: No. It's a weird reversal of the usual proportions of the selfless-gallantry genre, in which one man dies to save many... Meanwhile, the enemy is shown as lice to be exterminated--people who don't deserve ordinary decency, because they'll only use it against you--and noncombatants are painted as insignificant, if not unworthy. Honestly, I can't see much that Hitler would have wanted changed in Saving Private Ryan, except the color of the uniforms.

Loyal to its cliches of sentimentality and melodrama, as well as its touting of well-known actors with guaranteed box-office appeal, Hollywood is normally no place to go for accurate, unforgettable news about World War II. An exception to this dismal principle may be Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" -- at least part of it. Despite its boys'-adventure-story plot, which involves an attempt to locate and rescue a soldier whose three brothers have all been killed in the war, the movie's treatment of D-Day is so unrelenting in its appalling honesty that few combat veterans will emerge from it without crying and trembling all over again. Indeed, the first half-hour of this film should stifle forever all the unfeeling cant about the Good War. I'd like the Omaha Beach section made into a self-contained pseudo-documentary titled "Omaha Beach: Aren't You Glad You Weren't There?"...

But despite its authenticity about blood and noise, and about the tendency of both sides to shoot prisoners with pleasure, the film neglects something familiar to most combat infantrymen: open cowardice. In the battalion I fought in, two young officers, after their first night on the line, simply took off. They finally turned up in Paris. I also remember a new lieutenant who, when the position he was commanding came under German machine-gun fire, ran at full speed to the rear...Honorable as it is in places, "Saving Private Ryan" does not mark a new moment in Hollywood history. Hollywood's purpose is profit, and it has learned that violence sells.