Movie Review: 'Saving Private Ryan'
“There’s a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn’t a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.” — Barbara Kingsolver If 1993's Schindler's List was director Steven Spielberg's soul-searching and ultimately redemptive examination of why we fought the war, then 1998's Saving Private Ryan is the emotional bookend that depicts the sacrifices made by citizen-soldiers who put their lives on hold -- and often lost them -- to save the world from becoming a charnel-house ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Axis partners. It is a powerful and graphic film that has, in retrospect, reawakened our nation's interest in World War II and made us realize, however belatedly, how m