The film opens in the present day with an older man (Harrison Young) leading his family into the large military cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy. This man is revealed at the movie's end to be Private Ryan.

Very quickly, the narrative shifts to June 6, 1944, where we observe the first soldiers landing, and getting creamed in the process.

One landing squad is led by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), and contains all the G.I. types you have seen in countless other war movies: the ready-steady second in command--Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore); the wisecracking New Yorker--Pvt. Reiben (Edward Burns); the tough but tender Italian--Pvt. Caparzo (Vin Diesel); the Jewish kid with an attitude--Pvt. Mellish (Adam Goldberg); the empathetic medic--T/4 Wade (Giovanni Ribisi)--the psalm reciting southern sharpshooter--Pvt. Jackson (Barry Pepper) and the wet-behind-the-ears interpreter--Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies).

25 minutes of nonstop action and carnage erupt, but our squad finally takes out one of the enemy's concrete pillboxes, positioned high on a bluff.

With barely enough time to catch their breath, Miller's squad is given further orders. They must locate and extract a Pvt. James Ryan, who is being given a ticket home, since his three brothers have all died in combat. The order to extract Ryan has come from General George Marshall (Harve Presnell) himself.

The squad is none too happy with the assignment. After all, why should eight guys risk their lives for one man? Fair question, but this being wartime, and orders being orders, they are carried out.

Nearly two hours into the pic, Ryan (Matt Damon) is located, but he doesn't want to leave. What's left of his unit has been ordered to defend a bridge, and, if his biological brothers are gone, the only brothers he has left are the guys in his unit. Ryan says that he will leave after the bridge mission is accomplished.

Miller agrees, and the two groups combine in an action against a much larger and better equipped enemy tank force. The Germans are defeated because they have been slowed down enough to allow an American squadron to bomb their lights out.

Unfortunately, Miller's entire squad, including the Captain, is killed, but Private Ryan is saved.

We now return to the cemetery with the elderly Ryan asking his wife if he led a good life, and if he were a good man. She assures him that he has and is, as Ryan salutes the grave marker of Captain Miller.

No doubt, you have heard about the ultra violence and realism of this movie. Sorry folks, but that's mostly hype. Granted, there was lots of gore, but the LENGTH of the D-Day battle scene convinced people that it was worse than it actually was. Beach Red (1967) and Catch-22 (1970) had more astounding gore, and they were made well before the days of computer generated effects.

The performances were good, and as usual, everyone is gushing over Tom Hanks' workmanlike but by no means superlative effort. Although their parts were smaller, Sizemore and Burns did more acting.

But there is more to worry about here than just another movie.

My problem is with the whole pretense of the "Good War," as Studs Terkel termed WWII. What was so good about it? What did we get for our 55 million dead? And, why does WWII seem to control the franchise of good, noble, and heroic?

Sad to say, WWII was the war that made the world safe for communism!!

This war started out with the Nazis invading Poland, and later taking over a large part of Europe. The war ended with Poland, and the rest of Eastern Europe, controlled by the Soviets. Who decided that one totalitarian system was better than the other?

Why is it that German soldiers are always depicted as cardboard character homicidal robots? Spielberg overplayed that hand in Schindler's List (1993), and should have shown more humanity here. He did give himself 2 hours and 50 minutes, and one of the film's several slow scenes COULD have been replaced with a sequence showing realistic German soldiers. I wonder how far he would have gotten with the one-dimensional approach if the enemy were Japanese or native Americans?

It's very telling that in this fictional account, General Marshall quotes the words of Abe Lincoln to console Mrs. Ryan on the loss of her three sons.

Marshall's ignominious record--especially after the War--is well known and needs no further comment here.

Lincoln, the man who presided over an unbelievably bloody and highly avoidable fratricidal war, is somehow honored as one of our greatest presidents.

War IS Hell, but second place has to be awarded to how it is depicted after the fact.