Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

“Can I help you?”

Those are the first words spoken by Steven Spielberg in his memorable cameo as a mustached Chicago tax collector in John Landis’ The Blues Brothers (1980). Munching on a sandwich during his 5-minute break, he pokes his head through the door and asks if he can help our heroes. With no time to lose, the Blues Brothers grab him, drag him to his desk and plop him down.

“This is where they pay the taxes, right!??” frantically asks John Belushi’s Jake.

“…Right,” Spielberg replies.

Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood takes out a thick wad of cash from a briefcase and holds it up: “This money is for the year’s assessment on the Saint Helen of the Blessed Shroud Orphanage in Calumet City, Illinois.”

“Five thousand bucks! It’s all there, pal!” Belushi adds.

As hordes of hotheaded Chicago PD blast their way to the top of the building, Spielberg patiently signs, stamps, and completes the Brothers’ transaction. “And here is your receipt,” he concludes, attempting to hand it to the Brothers—just before their wrists are suddenly handcuffed and they slowly turn around, faced with the disconcerting sight of an untold number of rifle barrels pointed right at them.

Sure, the Brothers wind up going to jail. But at least Spielberg was able to help them first. And what’s more, he got to help out John Landis with a witty little cameo. Must’ve been his way of returning the favor after Landis’ own cameo in Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), where he played a dust-covered motorcycle messenger yanked off his ride by Belushi (and distracted when Belushi literally cries wolf—“baby wolf!” to be exact).

A couple of years later, Spielberg and Landis would help each other again on Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), for which they would both serve as producers and for which they would each direct one of the film’s four ambitious segments. It seemed like a marvelous attempt to combine their respective talents until Landis made a fateful, pre-dawn telephone call to Spielberg on July 23, 1982, informing him that the worst possible thing had happened: under Landis’ watch, actor Vic Morrow and child actors Renee Shin-Yi Chen and My-Ca Dinh Le had been decapitated and crushed by a helicopter on the film’s set.

“Do you have a press agent?” Spielberg asked Landis over the phone.

It would be the last time Spielberg ever helped Landis. And Twilight Zone: The Movie would destroy their friendship.

The long headache which followed began when a truck driver from the set began claiming that Spielberg had been present on the set that night. Landis called the allegations “preposterous”, and defended Spielberg. The truck driver later admitted he might have confused Spielberg with Frank Marshall, and Spielberg himself swore to the NTSB that he had not been on the set that night—“or at any other time.”

But the tension between Spielberg and Landis didn’t end there.

As the investigation dragged on, Landis’ attorney publicly demanded that Spielberg be investigated for his possible involvement in the hiring of the two children who had been killed alongside Morrow. When the DA’s office did nothing (the statute of limitations had already expired on the matter of the children’s’ employment), Landis’ attorney accused Spielberg of trying to be above the law: “What other major witness could avoid questioning by signing a piece of paper?” A couple of the films Spielberg would later make in the 1980’s (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Empire of the Sun) afforded him the luxury of being out of the country for much of the time and, thus, the luxury of dodging all attempts at being questioned during the investigation, as well as Landis’ involuntary manslaughter trial.

Landis was finally acquitted in 1987. By then, Spielberg had already gone to great pains to distance himself from him. Irreparable damage had been done to their friendship, and there was no avoiding it. When Joseph McBride tried to interview Landis, in 1995, for his Spielberg biography, Landis simply declared, “I haven’t talked to Steven in years,” and heatedly refused to answer questions about Twilight Zone: The Movie.

So, what of the movie itself? Is it any good?

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Twilight Zone: The Movie. I basically agree with the general consensus: that Landis and Spielberg’s segments are sometimes-interesting but mostly thin, whereas Joe Dante and George Miller’s segments are fun and imaginative—the way a Twilight Zone episode ought to be. Roger Ebert summed this up in his original review of the film: “The surprising thing is, the two superstar directors are thoroughly routed by two less-known directors whose previous credits have been horror and action pictures.”

Some critics believe that Spielberg’s segment is the least successful of the four. I think Landis’ segment is the least successful; it’s hurt not so much by its weak script as it is by the way it was butchered by the real-life tragedy that burned down its production.

Landis’ segment begins promisingly, with Vic Morrow’s bigoted William Connor introduced by Burgess Meredith’s narrator as “a sour man—a lonely man—who’s tired of waiting for the breaks that come to others, but never to him.” He enters a bar, miserable about a job promotion he lost at work to a Jew. He’s rejected by the waitresses. He goes on a tirade about black people and Asians, but reserves his most revealing discriminatory comments for Jews: “Them kikes. They always get more money, you know that, don’t you…What else the hell they want, for Christ’s sake? They own everything as it is!”

“Come on, Bill. Jews don’t own everything!” nervously laughs one of Connor’s friends, played by Charles Hallahan, from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

“The A-Rabs won’t let ‘em!” adds the other friend, played by Doug McGrath, most famous as the dopey cop from Black Christmas, and who later appeared as a dying bus driver in Spielberg’s Always (1989).

Morrow goes on one racist tangent after another. His character isn’t meant to be likable, but, as Landis’ dialogue begins to make clear, we are meant to at least empathize with him. “I love this country, dammit!” he roars. “And I fought for it in Korea!” Such dialogue suggests that this man is not entirely bad, that he’s done good things in his life but has been blinded by prejudice along the way. He is clearly meant to undergo some kind of redemption at the end of the segment by overcoming his prejudice.

And so he would have… had the helicopter incident not happened.

In the segment, the Twilight Zone takes William Connor to task for his prejudices by transporting him to Nazi-occupied Paris, a torch-lit Ku Klux Klan rally in the Deep South, and war-torn Vietnam. Along the way, he is chased by Nazis, Klan and U.S. soldiers who all mistake him for some kind of ethnicity and try to kill him. By the end of the segment, Connor was supposed to be so flustered by experiencing so much prejudice all at once that he finally overcomes his prejudices, and attempts to save two small Vietnamese children from an exploding compound while a U.S. helicopter flies overhead.

And so he would have… had the helicopter not crashed on the set, and claimed the lives of Morrow and the two children.

Unable to film the segment's original ending, now that his star had been killed, Landis and his editor, Malcolm Campbell, were forced to re-arrange the segment during post-production so that William Connor now suddenly (and rather abruptly) ends up back in Paris, is captured by the Nazis, is thrown into a boxcar with Jews and sent off to a death camp. For added insult to injury, the Twilight Zone contorts things so that he even spots his two friends from the bar standing aimlessly outside the train; his screams for them go unheard.

This is such a disgusting way to end the segment, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it trivializes the Holocaust. It’s also dramatically confusing; Landis' script has already made it clear to us that William Connor is a Korean War veteran, and Burgess Meredith’s narrator has made it clear to us that Connor is a “lonely” man and, therefore, something of a complicated, tragic figure.

What, then, has William Connor ever done in his life that is bad enough to merit a fate as ghoulish as being shipped off to die in a gas chamber? You’d think he’d have learned his lesson by the end of the segment, so… what is the Twilight Zone trying to prove, exactly, by not only disciplining him, but then proceeding to kill him as well? The other Jews in the boxcar are, of course, even more innocent than Connor is, which begs the question: If the Twilight Zone truly possesses the extraordinary power to catapult a perplexed bigot into three hateful periods of time, then why can’t it also, you know… somehow rescue all those Jews in the boxcar? Or, here’s an idea: reverse history completely and stop the whole Holocaust from happening? (The show would later try to do just that, of course, in the 2002 episode “Cradle of Darkness”). Furthermore, I also wonder what the hell must have been running through Landis' mind when he realized that by editing the segment this way, he would, essentially, be horribly killing off Morrow on-screen -- after Morrow had already died horribly off-screen.

All of these issues are just a lead-up to the very thing that killed this segment’s chances for success: the helicopter accident. It should never have happened. It was the worst possible thing that could have happened. It ruined post-production. It ruined the careers of everyone who worked on it. It even ruined Vic Morrow’s performance, which had so much potential.

On that last criticism, the filmmakers would disagree with me. At Morrow’s memorial service a few days after his death, Landis eulogized, "Tragedy can strike in an instant, but film is immortal. Vic lives forever. Just before the last take, Vic took me aside to thank me for the opportunity to play this role." And the film's associate producer, George Folsey, added, "If there is any consolation in this, it is that the film is finished. This performance must not be lost. It was Vic's last gift to us."

But the truth is that Morrow’s performance would have been far more affecting and cathartic had the segment ended as originally planned: with William Connor rescuing the two children, and becoming a better man in the process. Without that ending, the segment merely ends with a bigoted man getting shipped off to be gassed. It leaves us cold and disoriented. We don’t understand the point of it all, and we don’t understand why the segment was made in the first place.

Consequently, there is a kind of disturbing emotional detachment to the segment which colors my opinion of Landis as a filmmaker. I’m of the opinion that when Landis does screwball comedy, he can be brilliant (National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers), but that when he tackles a project that involves big emotions, he chickens out. An American Werewolf in London (1981) is, in many ways, his most well-directed film, but it is nevertheless compromised by a mean-spirited ending that shies away from the emotion that’s been building throughout the whole thing. We become so wrapped up in the romance between David Naughton and Jenny Agutter that when Naughton’s demise at the end of that film is followed abruptly by Landis’ tongue-in-check decision to play “Blue Moon” over the end credits, we feel hurt and betrayed by the director; the ending is not given the delicate attention it deserves. When Landis recently appeared on a European show alongside Terry Gilliam, another emotionally-frigid director, to discuss what they both think of other films and filmmakers, I was surprised that they never once discussed Spielberg, a far more emotional filmmaker whom they both have chilly relationships with (Gilliam has criticized Spielberg’s directorial style on countless occasions).

Spielberg’s own segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, a remake of the episode, “Kick the Can”, is, predictably, a far more emotional segment than Landis’, though not without problems of its own. Originally, he had been scheduled to remake a different episode from the show—“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”—but, after the helicopter accident, he wisely elected to avoid directing a segment involving young children and frightening special effects. In fact, Spielberg, according to Joseph McBride, “tried to abandon the entire project, but Warner Bros. lawyers, fearing that cancellation of the film could be construed as an admission of guilt, insisted he fulfill his contract.”

Of Spielberg’s “Kick the Can” remake, Roger Ebert was onto something when he suggested, “Spielberg's visual style in this segment is so convoluted and shadowy that the action is hard to follow; the master of clear-cut, sharp-edged visuals is trying something that doesn't work.” A more simpler way to put it is: The segment suffers from dull pacing. The tale of magical wanderer Mr. Bloom, who grants the gift of youth to a group of retirement home residents, just doesn’t benefit from the exuberant imagination that one expects from a Twilight Zone story (and which flowers beautifully in the Dante and Miller segments which follow Spielberg's).

There are three great moments in Spielberg’s segment, however, that make it worth seeing. The first is when sad-eyed Leo Conroy (Bill Quinn) waddles out of Sunnyvale Rest Home, a briefcase hand-in-hand, and attempts to hitch a ride with his son, a real estate agent.

“You said… maybe you think I could come visit,” Conroy pathetically asks his son, with deep sincerity. “Come visit?” The son is evasive, claiming “bad timing” and half-heartedly suggesting, “Maybe next week?” while he’s egged on by his wife to get going. The son departs with a quick, indifferent kiss and waves goodbye, while Leo Conroy walks miserably back into the rest home.

From inside, old playboy Mr. Agee (Murray Matheson) has been watching the whole thing, and informs a newcomer, Mr. Bloom (Scatman Crothers), that this is not the first time this has happened: “Every second Saturday, he carries those cases down to his kid’s car. And every second Saturday, he carries them back upstairs, here, and unpacks them.”

It is a surprisingly-moving way to begin the segment, and in some ways feels like Spielberg’s tribute to Yasujiro Ozu and Tokyo Story. An old man wants to spend time with his adult son, but is politely refused. In all its simplicity, this is an achingly visceral moment, one in which Spielberg makes us recognize the feelings of isolation that come with old age—all the more startling because it occurs in the Twilight Zone, where intimate, human emotions are rather uncommon.

The second great moment in Spielberg’s segment is a beautiful speech by Mr. Bloom (Spielberg described Scatman Crothers in this role as “the Black E.T.”), after the now-young retirement home residents tell him that they don’t want to remain children forever, and would rather return to their older lives. “Well,” sighs Mr. Bloom with a pearly smile, “you can always go inside, and go back to bed. Maybe, if you old folks had a little of that magic still left in you, you could wake up back in your old, nice bodies. But, with fresh, young minds.” Jerry Goldsmith’s music during this scene is particularly wonderful.

The third great moment in the segment comes close to the end, when Mr. Conroy, who had earlier refused Mr. Bloom’s gift of youth, witnesses a young Mr. Agee (Evan Richards) fleeing out the rest home’s window. He stops him—not to try to get him in trouble, but because he, too, now longs for the gift of youth.

“Please...” Mr. Conroy begs, “Take me with you. I wanna go, too.”

The young Mr. Agee replies by paraphrasing Hamlet: “You can’t come with me, Leo. You’ll have to stay with yourself. There’s a destiny that shapes our ends, rough hewn though it may be. I’m sorry. Well… let’s AWAY!” before flying off into the night.

“I’m ready, now,” pines Mr. Conroy. “I’m ready.” The other residents comfort him with hands on his shoulders, as they all stare out into the night. The following morning, Mr. Conroy is found on the front lawn gleefully playing kick-the-can. Off to the side, Mr. Bloom observes Mr. Conroy at play, then looks into the camera and grins, “He’ll get it.”

These are the three great moments that make “Kick the Can” worth watching. For the most part, it’s a fairly tedious segment that drags during the long passages of the residents bickering in the rest home and, later, goofing around after they’re transformed into little kids. But every now and then, that invaluable Spielbergian magic kicks in during the segment and shows its face. “Although filmed in an excessively whimsical manner that blunts some of its emotional potential,” agrees Joseph McBride in his Spielberg biography, “”Kick the Can’ represents a further step in Spielberg’s maturation process. Under the sobering influence of the events of the previous summer, he made a bittersweet film about the need to turn one’s back on childhood and accept the coming of age.”

So, from my perspective, Spielberg’s segment, while problematic, is superior to Landis’ segment, mostly because it’s the more cathartic of the two and because it wasn’t butchered by real-life circumstances during its production. It is, of course, unfortunate that Twilight Zone: The Movie ultimately destroyed Spielberg's friendship with Landis, and the mystery behind Spielberg's possible involvement in the hiring of the two children will probably never be solved, but, at the end of the day, it cannot be ignored that three people died in a horrible accident. And Spielberg’s own subtle criticisms of Landis’ conduct during that accident are a painful reminder of the responsibilities of being a filmmaker:

“A movie is a fantasy—it’s light and shadow flickering on a screen. No movie is worth dying for. I think people are standing up much more now than ever before to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, ‘Cut!’”

Small Soldiers (1998)

Towards the end of Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers, a band of pacifist toys make the crucial decision to put away long-held ideals and spring into action. The Gorgonites were designed to be kind, peaceful and educational to kids, but now the evil Commando Elite toys are taking over the neighborhood, and the life of Alan Abernathy, the kid who has been sheltering the Gorgonites all along, is being threatened.

Archer, emissary of the Gorgonites, steps forth. He cannot abide the cruelty of the Commando Elite any longer. He attempts to rally his comrades. “Gorgonites,” he commands, “we must help Alan.”

The Gorgonites are appalled by this idea. One by one, they make one desperate protest after another:

“But if we fight, we will lose!”

“Last time we fought, I woke up with AMFM!”

“I tell ya: War is nuts! And I know what I’m talking about!”

“We shouldn’t fight! We should hide!”

Archer listens to all of these protests. No doubt he understands their concern—for, being a Gorgonite, he knows what it means to run away from violence, to survive at all costs. But now the Gorgonites’ nonviolence may very well cost the life of the kid who trusted them and provided them safety. If they don’t act, Alan will die. Archer doesn’t particularly want to fight, but he has to. Hiding will no longer do them any good.

 “If we hide,” Archer concludes, “…we will still lose. No more hiding.”

At age 7, when I saw Small Soldiers during initial release in the summer of 1998, it was these words spoken by Archer that led me to realize what a great movie this was. Up until then, I was enjoying Small Soldiers merely as gleeful, escapist entertainment, pumped full of big action, bad toys, dopey parents, a hot teenage Kirsten Dunst and an insecure teenage hero I immediately identified with in young Gregory Smith. But by the time Archer gave his speech, rallying the Gorgonites to fight, something about Small Soldiers appealed to the grade-school warrior in me, and I realized that this was a very intelligent film, treating me like an adult with its focus not just on the issues of growing pains, but the issues of warfare.

Watching it today, I still stand by what I felt at age 7: Small Soldiers is a great movie, perhaps even Joe Dante’s best movie, and this is the director who has also given us Gremlins, The Howling, Innerspace, The ‘Burbs and Matinee. That being said, I don’t always agree with interpretations posed by the film’s various fans. I sometimes hear the film described as “antiwar”, for example; I couldn’t disagree more with that assessment. One of the film's fans whom I disagree with is Jonathan Rosenbaum, who reviewed the film around the same time when Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan was in theaters. In his review, Rosenbaum dismissed Saving Private Ryan as jingoistic propaganda, then added, "One of the finer virtues of Small Soldiers is that it cuts through this kind of crap and makes the very idea of a war film look ridiculous."

I disagree enormously with Rosenbaum's dismissal of Saving Private Ryan, and even with some of his theories about Small Soldiers, although I do agree with him that Small Soldiers is partially constructed as a satire of war movies. Certainly, Small Soldiers does take a bit of pleasure in lampooning war movies in general. The members of the jingoistic Commando Elite, for example, are all voiced by cast members from Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, a hardcore war/action flick so celebrated for its jingoism that, even before Dante, Nora Ephron was already making fun of it in Sleepless in Seattle. The war-movie satiric agenda of Small Soldiers is also announced when the Commando Elite first come to life in the film: Major Chip Hazard (voiced by Tommy Lee Jones) rips his way out of a plastic box and gives a warmongering speech in front of a giant American flag, Patton-style. On the film’s soundtrack, we hear Edwin Starr's aggressively-pacifist “War! What Is It Good For?” And in a later scene, a drunken Phil Hartman (in his last film role) is heard to mutter the infamous line, “I think World War II was my favorite war” (Rosenbaum, in his review, wittily muses: “It seems like a line Steven Spielberg might utter”).

All of this is considerable, and yet I’ve always believed that the screenplay for Small Soldiers (written by Adam Rifkin, Gavin Scott, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio) has a lot more on its mind that just satirizing war and war movies. For example: In an early scene, when young Alan (Gregory Smith) has come into possession of Archer (voiced by Frank Langella), he wonders why all the other Gorgonites have fled into hiding. “Monsters shouldn’t be hiding,” complains Alan. “They should be out fighting Commandos.”

“We would lose,” Archer mutters. “It is what we were programmed to do.”

Alan is flabbergasted. “Hide and lose? Those are some great options!”

In scenes like this, I’ve always felt that as much as Small Soldiers lampoons the mindlessness of violence, it also recognizes the consequences of simply ignoring violence. What good can “hiding and losing” do anyone, the films asks, after violence has already landed in your own neighborhood, on your front doorstep? When next-door neighbor, Kristy (Kirsten Dunst), is captured and tortured by the Commando Elite, the film’s attitude towards violence drastically changes with a key line of dialogue spoken by the film’s hero, Alan: “Major Hazard wants a war. We’ll give him a war.”

The character of Kristy is, like the Gorgonites, initially a pacifist herself. Her bedroom wall is plastered with a poster which reads, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” We have no reason to disagree, at first. But when the Commando Elite transform Kristy’s “Gwendy dolls” (voiced by Christina Ricci and Sarah Michelle Gellar) into devilish little Bride-of-Frankenstein freaks, they rebel against Kristy and even attempt to decapitate her; Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” plays on the soundtrack, as a way of signifying that Kristy’s peaceful ideals have no way of reaching her at this point—let alone saving her. It’s no wonder that when Alan comes to the rescue, not only does he wipe out some Gwendy dolls in the process, but even Kristy herself gets a taste for blood and finds herself actually taking pleasure in killing. “This is fun!” she squeals, chopping up her once-precious dolls with a club.

At age 7, I have to admit that I found all of this very exciting. That doesn’t mean that I think Small Soldiers works simply because of the visceral kick I got out of watching toys get clobbered. I just mean to say that for all of the film’s points about the ridiculousness of warfare, nevertheless, the cathartic thrill experienced from such an incredible variation on warfare as toys destroying each other was never lost on me, even at such a young age.

Rosenbaum himself confessed in his review that the Gorgonites yielded an “emotional response” from him, and he added, “The fact that they’re programmed to hide as well as lose is poetically apt given the way such icons are routinely swept to the margins of a pop media culture that places a higher premium on the ‘action’ of explosive killing machines.” It’s this aspect of the film that first appealed to me, as a young kid often bullied in grade school; no doubt Small Soldiers, if not outright antiwar, is at least making heroes out of the side that generally loses in war, while rejecting the history of war as told by the side that usually wins. In the film, this manifests not only as Denis Leary’s hawkish CEO but also as Kristy’s macho biker boyfriend, who jeers at Alan for being a high school dropout but later chickens out when faced with the Commando Elite threat, his pants literally catching on fire as he screams hysterically out into the night (leaving the presumably-wimpy Alan to finish off where he started).

Joe Dante's work has been celebrated by Steven Spielberg ever since Spielberg stood up for his film Piranha (1978), preventing Universal from having the film removed from theaters when it was initially perceived as just another Jaws ripoff. He offered Gremlins to Dante after being further impressed with his work on The Howling (1981). One pleasure of Dante's work is that it is full of sly parodies of Spielberg; when Joseph McBride once asked him if Gremlins was meant to be “E.T. With Teeth,” Dante replied, “Yes, and Steven cooperated entirely with it. He got the joke right away." Dante's films Innerspace and Gremlins 2: The New Batch were Amblin productions as well, and after Small Soldiers lingered in development hell for 10 years, Spielberg was the one who finally selected Dante to direct, making it one of the first films made for DreamWorks. 

The film did not do very well at the box office. Perhaps that was because most parents that summer were too concerned with Clinton’s impeachment to take their kids to see it. Or maybe because Roger Ebert, in his 2 ½-star review, scared parents away with his dubious opinion that it was too scary for kids. I actually think Rosenbaum was more accurate on audience responses to the film when he observed, “I can’t think of a Hollywood entertainment I’ve enjoyed as much all year, and both audiences I saw the movie with seemed delighted as well.”

Rosenbaum further argues, “Spielberg’s encouragement of Dante’s anti-Spielbergian projects goes beyond tolerance.” But I would argue that Spielberg did, indeed, recognize the subversive elements of Small Soldiers, and didn’t greenlight it for Dante merely under the assumption that it would be another big hit like Gremlins. Spielberg himself is hardly an alien to films satirizing the ridiculousness of warfare; when 1941 (1979) was released, it inspired a Heavy Metal/Arrow spin-off comic book that opened with an introduction by Spielberg in which he stated, “I felt that after the war in Vietnam and the disillusionment the nation experienced, it was important to remind people that war doesn’t have to be a trip up the river to hell; it could also be a lot of laughs.” A film like Small Soldiers appeals to a similar philosophy, and it is difficult to believe it could have been lost on Spielberg, even during his more serious attitude towards war films by the late 90’s.

But the argument in Rosenbaum’s review that I disagree the most with is his assertion “that Small Soldiers ridicules the agenda of films like Saving Private Ryan.” In my opinion, the philosophy of the two films is actually quite similar. In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg reaches the conclusion that war is hell, but that it can also inspire decency and heroism. In Small Soldiers, Dante reaches the conclusion that war is hell, but that it can also be fun—not just in Kristy’s exclamation of, “This is fun!” while chopping up her dolls, but also when Chip Hazard wryly asks, “Ain’t war hell?” while shooting at Alan in the climax, provoking Alan to roar, “Have I got a shock for you—you STUPID TOY!” before electrocuting Hazard to death. And by the time Kristy finishes off the rest of the lot by running them over with a lawn mower, she excitedly asks Alan, “Is this going to be a pattern for our relationship!??” which seems like nothing if not an indication of the sexual high she gets out of killing (no wonder Pat Benetar’s “Love Is A Battlefield” occupies its own special place on the soundtrack).

Small Soldiers leaves us with the realization that war is a lot of things. Yes, it’s “hell”, and yes, it’s “nuts”—but it can also be “fun”, and it can make heroes out of wimpy kids and societal misfits, and sometimes it can be liberating as well. “Gorgonites, we’re free!” declares Archer, after his comrades have emerged from the carnage unscathed. I never do fail, either, to get a little teary-eyed during the film’s touching final sequence, scored beautifully by Jerry Goldsmith, when the Gorgonites decide it’s time to go carve out a land of their own in the world (Dante seems to be alluding to the ending of Schindler’s List), while Archer leaves Alan with parting words of wisdom: “Even if you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” For Alan, it means finding the strength within himself to fight for the things he loves, and by the time the movie is over, we are convinced he’s achieved just that. His own days of “hiding and losing” are over.

War Horse (2011)

When this movie was over, I wept. It was nothing for me to be ashamed of. Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is a painterly masterpiece, woven together with beauty and sadness, strength and heartbreak, triumph and love. It tells the story of a horse that is plunged headfirst into the cauldron of World War I, and the teenage boy who descends into the hells of the trenches to find it and bring it home. But it is more, too. It invited me, like a warm blanket, into its world of green pastures and smoky battlefields, and introduced me to characters—both human and animal—that I began to love and adore with great emotion, as if they were real presences in my own life. It would not be enough for me to say that this is my favorite movie of the year. This is one of the best movies I've ever seen.

All great filmmakers have one thing in common: they expand on ideas that worked for them in the past. From there, they create new and unexpected works of art. Steven Spielberg is no exception: he is our finest poet of communication breakdowns. We remember, from his films, Elliot, Gertie and Michael teaching E.T. how to talk; Nettie teaching Celie how to read; Adams, Joadson and Baldwin teaching Cinque about American customs; Viktor Navorski teaching himself how to speak English. But War Horse is a horse of a different color, and in more ways than one. Spielberg has always had a penchant for challenging his audiences to invest their care in the narratives of unusual protagonists. This time, he has mounted his most compelling narrative challenge for us since A.I., by centering his latest film around a teenage boy learning to communicate—intimately—with a creature that doesn’t talk at all.

Jeremy Irvine plays Albert Narracott, a young English lad growing up on his family’s farm in Devon in 1913. In the opening passages of War Horse, Spielberg and his world treasure of a cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, soar over the lime-green fields of England, in a merrily nostalgic evocation of John Ford’s The Quiet Man, before settling down to a starry-eyed Albert watching, through a fence, while a pregnant mother horse gives birth to a baby fawn. The boy can hardly hold back his excitement. This could very well be the first time he has ever born witness to an event of profound, natural beauty.

The newborn horse is not as amused with its own surroundings, which Spielberg makes palpably felt in a harrowing little scene where it is taken, kicking and screaming, away from its mother, whom it will never see again. It has been purchased by Albert’s father, Ted (Peter Mullan), who snagged it at an auction for no good reason other than to smite his bourgeoisie landlord, Lyons (David Thewlis), while they were both flexing their muscles in a futile game of prewar class warfare. Spielberg, indeed, bookends War Horse with two sequences set at auctions: the first one, a bet for the horse’s ownership, and the second, a bet for its life. His basic point is that horses, no matter if they’re impressive or unimpressive creatures, will always be at the mercy of us. We are the ones who determine whether they are destined for happy lives or as fodder for the meat grinder, and sometimes, he argues, we do it in the names of greed and masculine pride. In war and in life, just because horses are beings of a lesser intelligence, they are not afforded the luxury of choice.

What Albert Narracott does want to establish, between himself and the new horse, is a system of trust. Remember Elliot having to bait E.T., with Reese’s Pieces, in order to lead him into his house? Spielberg replicates some of that magic here, when Albert realizes he’s going to need to bait the new horse, somehow, in order to earn its friendship. Why not turn his back, and allow the bucket to resonate more like a breakfast waiting patiently for its customer, instead of like an intimidating instrument of force-feeding and torture? Albert tries this out, and it works. The horse quietly steps up, eases its snout into the bucket and chows down, and remains admirably calm while Albert pets it and bestows upon it a name: “I’m gonna call you Joey.”

Albert’s family, the Narracotts, is one of the most lovable movie families in recent memory. Albert is an idealistic young lad; Ted is alternately a drunken fool and an observant farmer who knows what to do in a time of economic panic; and Rose (Emily Watson) is a headstrong wife and mother (the most fully-realized heroine in Spielberg’s career since, well, ever) who maintains the family’s sanity even while struggling to maintain her own. In one of the funniest and, at the same time, most touching shots composed by Spielberg in the film, the director places Rose in the foreground, allowing her to have a private moment all to herself while the farm goose waddles in the lower right-hand corner of the frame, minding its own business. This goose likes to act as man of the house in Ted and Albert’s place, and has the freedom to do what they are in no position to do—that is, chase away unwanted authorities, like Lyons, whenever they descend on the Narracott homestead and give the family a hard time.

The first hour of War Horse is a joyous one, allowing the audience to get to know the Narracotts, and the rest of the village, as they slowly but surely rally behind Albert’s efforts to raise Joey as a farm horse that can plough through even the hardest of stone and mud. But this barely even begins to describe the range of Spielberg’s film, which reaches a turning point after Ted realizes what must be done to save the family farm: sell Joey to the English cavalry. Over the course of the film, Joey will fall into the custody of a host of different characters, all of whom are impressed by the power and strength of this horse, and many of whom, no doubt, would like to take it home with them after the war is over. We follow Joey and, later, Albert—when he enlists in the war in hopes that Joey will be recovered—as their adventures carry them from forests to hillsides, windmills to No Man’s Land, against a nightmarish depiction of trench warfare that invites comparison to Kubrick and Paths of Glory.

The film remains true to the 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, which I have already read and covered, and also, presumably, to the recent London stage play by Nick Stafford, which I haven’t yet seen. To adapt Morpurgo’s complicated story, Spielberg has hired two of England’s most talented screenwriters, Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, whose resumes look almost tailor-made for a project of this emotional magnitude. Hall was the one who located the human story in Billy Elliot, making that film one of the surprise indie hits of the late 1990’s. Curtis is more well-known in the industry, perhaps because of his enjoyable romantic comedies (Notting Hill, Love Actually, The Girl in the Café), although it wasn’t until 2009’s Pirate Radio when I thought he finally managed to reach a kind of cinematic brilliance. Spielberg may have also hired Curtis because of his involvement with the 80's television show Blackadder Goes Forth, which I haven’t watched, but which, evidently, was the work of a filmmaker who already knew a thing or two about the first world war.

Together, Hall and Curtis lay the ground plan for Spielberg’s vision: to make a film about the war in which all sides are granted their dignity. Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) and Major Stewart (Benedict Cumberbatch) are gentle, commanding officers of the British cavalry who treat Joey and his eventual horse companion—a black beauty named Topthorn—as fellow soldiers deserving of their respect, while the young, sickly Emilie (Celine Buckens) and her doting grandfather (Niels Arestrup) represent the spirit of France, welcoming Joey and Topthorn into their windmill home with open arms. But there is a sympathetic portrait of Germany here, too; Spielberg does not fall into the same trap Howard Hawks and John Huston fell into, in Sergeant York, when they inadvertently reduced Kaiser helmet-wearing Germans to a nameless, anonymous enemy. Gunther (David Kross) and his 14-year old brother Michael (Leonhard Carow) attempt to free Joey and Topthorn from the madness of the war, while risking their own lives in the process. And it is the jolly, bearded gunman Friedrich (Nicolas Bro) who remains by Topthorn’s side at a crucial moment, and screams for Joey to run for his life just when a Panzer is about to unleash all hell on No Man’s Land.

There are no villains in this film. Why would there be? World War I was a superfluous, pointless war, and it would have been a mistake to demonize any of the world powers because none of them were guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors; the war was fought not for world freedom, but for class and politics. As Lyons, David Thewlis plays an antagonist who, despite being an upper-class bully, allows the Narracotts their chance to raise Joey, even while he remains somewhat justifiably skeptical of the horse’s skills. Lyons has a son, David (Robert Emms), who intimidates Albert with his cars and hot babes until he finds himself being rescued—by Albert—in the heat of battle, later on in the film. Brandt (Rainer Bock), the cigar-smoking German major who makes life difficult for Joey and Topthorn, is really just a hardened soldier who has taught himself to adhere by a commonly-accepted rule: don’t ever dote on horses and give them names, or else you’ll get too carried away with grief once you've seen them die on the battlefield.

Spielberg has cast every actor in this movie to perfection. I am tempted to describe how much I admired the performances by all of them, but that way madness lies. I’ll limit to myself to the Narracotts. Jeremy Irvine is quite a refreshing new discovery as Albert; he’s the kind of younger actor that directors like David Lean loved to work with, so I guess it’s not a surprise to learn that Mike Newell has cast him in an upcoming Great Expectations remake. Peter Mullan is an actor who’s never made a great impression on me until now. I don’t seem to recall his role in Braveheart, although I well remember him as the corrupt cop in Children of Men. Here, he bravely takes upon the role of a father who has kept his own memories of war heavily-guarded, and finds himself sometimes having to go against the wishes of his wife and son in order to protect the family. And Emily Watson, perhaps my favorite living actress, is a true blessing in the canvas. In one of the film’s most quietly moving moments, when her husband asks her how she will react if he does the unthinkable, she pointedly replies, “I may hate you more… but I will never love you less.” Even she is prepared to condone that decision which she fears the most.

In the past, Spielberg and his usual team of technical collaborators (Janusz Kaminski, Michael Kahn, John Williams) have managed to tackle extraordinary narratives of an awesome variety, but here they face a considerable challenge: how do you mount an epic in which the main protagonist is an animal? The original Morpurgo book relied on narration from Joey’s inner thoughts, but Spielberg has resisted that approach here, perhaps because the last time DreamWorks distributed a film narrated by a horse (2002’s Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron), it was a resounding box office flop. Spielberg has taken a wiser approach, I believe, by trusting his audience enough to let us figure out, for ourselves, what Joey is thinking in key sequences. When Albert, for example, teaches Joey, through clever visual expression, that there’s nothing dangerous about putting on a harness, Joey is able to silently pass this knowledge onto Topthorn later on, in a wonderfully understated moment. Or consider the climactic scene in which Joey finds himself cornered by the approaching Panzer (in a startling quotation of Saving Private Ryan’s finale), and his frightened neighing conveys to us what narration wouldn’t have needed to. In fact, Spielberg enlisted no less than 15 different horses to play Joey, but you wouldn’t know it from the finished film. By the end, Joey has emerged as the most three-dimensional character in the story.

I went into War Horse expecting Spielberg to mount a war odyssey on the scale of Empire of the Sun. I did not anticipate a film that would both remain true to the source material and surprise me with scenes that came out of left field; the pivotal sequence in which an English and German soldier (Toby Kebbell and Hinnerck Schonemman) must put aside their differences to rescue Joey from a web of barbed wire in No Man’s Land has already been much discussed in other reviews. I went in already familiar with Morpurgo’s story, but was amazed at how captivated I finally was with the way Spielberg had reimagined it. He closes the film, fittingly, with a visual reference to Gone with the Wind (his first tribute to Victor Fleming since Always in ’89) that, I believe, will be remembered as a classic movie ending in itself: one that asks us what Joey and Albert have finally accomplished, even as we are already cheering them on for their accomplishments.

War Horse is Spielberg’s Christmas gift to us. More appropriately, it’s his reward to us—a reward for our natural wisdom as moviegoers. To fully appreciate Spielberg's achievement, however, there is catch: you must see this film with a mass audience. Watch how everybody in your theater falls under its spell, one by one. I know I did. I saw it with an audience that broke into applause after it was over, and I never wanted the applause to end; movies like this deserve all the applause in the world. After the past decade, with the failures of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what a relief it is to have this film, which states that most wars are not a question of good guys and bad guys. More often, they are a clash of human beings, unsure of why they fight each other and unaware of the common universal ideals which could ultimately unite them. Joey the horse is a represention of that ideal, and it doesn't matter that this story is set during another period in our world's history. War Horse is a movie for our time.

Jurassic Park 300 Mash-Up Trailer

The idea for this mash-up video first came to me in the summer of 2008. At the time, I didn't possess the technology and equipment necessary to complete it. So, in a way, this video is a fulfilled dream of sorts.


I actually had to go through about four cuts of this before deciding on a cut that I could live with. My hope is that Spielberg would be proud. And Zack Snyder, too, although I could care less what he thinks.

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Take a nice, long look at that flag. You’ll see it in the opening shot of this film, and you’ll see it again in the final shot, too.

Here’s what I see: a flag that is desaturated, drained of the color that would otherwise pump it with life. The red hues have turned pink, the white hues haved turned gray, the blue hues can barely be made out at all, and the stars have turned black. It is a transparent flag, waving back and forth in the middle of a cool dusk, while the sunlight pierces straight through its heart. "This isn't standard-issue symbology," writes critic Bryant Frazer. "The flag is blasted out, leached of all color. It signals that something fundamental has been lost forever, bled from our national psyche. But its mere presence in the frame insists that something else—perhaps something still more important—remains behind."

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) begins and ends with a shot of this flag, and there’s a reason: it is mourning a lost time, a dying generation. The brave American men who fought to keep banners like this one at the tops of our flagpoles are all but dead now, and Saving Private Ryan is a film that was made for them. In a review for Cinepad, critic Jim Emerson couldn't have said it better: "Saving Private Ryan may be the best movie ever made about heroism and honor in wartime. And that's because it shows how heroic conduct can be extraordinarily difficult, instinctive, impulsive, deliberate, and lucky—all at the same time."

Confessions are in order: Saving Private Ryan is not a perfect film. I’ve been defending it for years, but in order to properly defend Spielberg’s war epic it is necessary to concede that it has flaws. Spielberg worked from a screenplay by Robert Rodat that was well-written, but conventional. The structure—a journey through wartime, focused on a specific mission—was nothing radical. And while Spielberg’s film received honors both in the critical community and at the Academy Awards, there’s been a bit of a backlash against it in more recent years.

This isn't really a surprise, of course; practically all of Spielberg's "serious" films have had to suffer a backlash in the Hollywood elite community (no matter what the subject). But acclaim for this film, in particular, has been hard-won indeed. Out of the few negative reviews of Saving Private Ryan published when it was first released, perhaps none has been of greater service to the film’s most impassioned dissenters, in recent years, than the notorious 1-star review that was published in the Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

“For all the care and thoughtfulness that follow in the story,” Rosenbaum complained, “I never could shake the impression that all I was watching was every other war film Spielberg had ever seen… it becomes clear that the major lesson Spielberg has to teach us about war is what he’s learned from a lifetime of moviegoing. And what he’s learned turns out to be something for everyone rather than a single vision: war is hell, war is absurd, war is necessary, war is unnecessary, war is uplifting, war is depressing, war is a lesson in morality, war is a lesson in immorality, and so on.” He added, “I got mainly secondhand memories of All Quiet on the Western Front, [Samuel] Fuller’s war films, Kubrick’s war films, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and third-hand memories of John Ford’s war films and many others.”

In fairness, Rosenbaum has a point. Spielberg himself admitted in an interview with Richard Schickel, "You can’t have seen as many World War II movies as I’ve seen, and not have some of that rub off on Saving Private Ryan.” And, see, this is where Spielberg has a point, too: there have been so many war movies already made by various other filmmakers in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. How could Spielberg and Robert Rodat not have had some of the old Hollywood war movies in mind when writing out their film? The same arguments Rosenbaum throws at Saving Private Ryan could easily be directed at Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, another masterful war movie from 1998 that wasn’t entirely original in its perceptions of the subject. How do we know Malick’s perception of war as ugly, beautiful and naturalistic wasn’t a viewpoint he hadn’t already adopted from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now? War films make for a rather limited movie genre; there are only so many things a filmmaker can say about the subject. How can war movie conventions not make their way into just about any modern war movie, especially after so much has already been said in previous efforts?

I think Samuel Fuller is really the only filmmaker, out of all the filmmakers Rosenbaum mentions in his review, who had a significant influence on Saving Private Ryan. Fuller and Spielberg were evidently good friends during Fuller’s lifetime (Spielberg had cast Fuller as the Interceptor Command officer in 1941), and, Fuller’s influence is already present in a handful of Spielberg’s later films. Short Round in Temple of Doom, for example, was named after the kid from The Steel Helmet; and, in Minority Report, a violent scene from House of Bamboo is playing on television during the sequence in which Anderton’s eyes are taken out. Saving Private Ryan, thus, has a lot of scenes that reek of the influence of scenes from Fuller’s own war films. From The Steel Helmet, Spielberg recycles a scene in which GIs shoot in all directions at a sniper hiding in an elevated area, as well as a scene in which GIs contemplate executing an enemy POW. From The Big Red One, Spielberg recycles the device of a soldier who starts out a pacifist and ends up a cold-blooded killer by the end (Jeremy Davies’ Upham = Mark Hamill’s Griff). And you can tell that Spielberg probably watched the D-Day sequence in The Big Red One dozens of times before heading off to shoot the D-Day sequence for his own film.

But I’m not naming off all of these Fuller influences in the film just because I’m impressed with Spielberg’s knowledge of classic films. I mention them because Spielberg picked an appropriate influence; Fuller was, himself, an infantryman who served in World War II, so who better to borrow images and sequences from than a soldier—a fellow filmmaking artist—who was actually there? When Spielberg set out to make Saving Private Ryan, his desire was to erase the images contemporary audiences had of the war which they had received from dated, pro-war Hollywood propaganda. The time had come for a World War II movie that was going to be more realistic and more faithful to what the veterans saw. Therefore, when recreating D-Day, Spielberg was in better hands learning from Fuller’s The Big Red One, and not from something like The Longest Day (1965), in which producer Daryl F. Zanuck portrayed D-Day as a kind of joyous, aw-shucks event (I still remember Sean Connery jumping out of the boat yelling, “Come out, ya dirty slobs! FLANAGAN'S back!”). That was a movie that made it look like every Higgins boat had made it to shore safely—as if every GI made it halfway across the beach before getting killed. It had made D-Day look like fun. Spielberg had another vision in mind entirely.



“Spielberg is doing something unheard of with the opening of this movie,” says Quentin Tarantino. “Saving Private Ryan made me aware of some issues raised by the cinema of war that I was unable to ask on my own. The idea that forty men on a boat are exterminated in seconds by a volley of machine gun is terrifying. Can you imagine the most atrocious carnage? Obviously, yes. Except that throughout the scene, you are persuaded to attend the worst slaughter in history.” Tarantino has further pointed out that he was no longer able to look at either The Longest Day nor The Big Red One in the same way again; Spielberg had tossed aside Zanuck’s version of D-Day, picked up Fuller’s version and then had picked up from where Fuller had left off. Never before had we seen this event portrayed so gruesomely. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) assures his men, “I’ll see you on the beach!," but from the moment the murder holes of the Higgins boats are thrown open, Spielberg unleashes absolute hell. It is any wonder that at least a quarter of Miller’s men are finally able to join him on the beach.

Some of them drown. Some are burned alive in flamethrower streams, others in boats that explode. A soldier is shot in the heart just as Miller rescues him from the shores. Another picks up his own severed arm from the sand. One man is shot in the helmet, is dumbfounded by his survival, removes his helmet to examine the damage, and is then shot dead in the skull. Another man cries as his intestines spill out of his stomach. Miller requests assistance from a soldier in Shore Party, only to find a giant hole in the soldier's face. Miller and his men do finally capture the hill, but it is no proud victory. When he sees two GIs murder two surrendering Germans, he is appalled at their cowardice.

We notice that a soldier by the name of Sean Ryan is one of many who has died, his body one of many that have washed onto the bloody shores of Omaha. Two of Ryan’s other brothers, Peter and Daniel, die in other battles on the same day, and this will set into motion the film’s basic plot to find the last surviving brother, James. But Roger Ebert writes that there’s another reason why Spielberg opens Saving Private Ryan with the D-Day landing: “This landing sequence is necessary to establish the distance between those who give the order that Pvt. Ryan be saved, and those who are ordered to do the saving.” Indeed, after the invasion ends, Miller's men are distraught at the carnage they have each participated in. When Caparzo (Vin Diesel) picks up a Hitler Youth knife from the corpse of an enemy soldier and makes a joke about it, Mellish (Adam Goldberg), an American Jew, isn’t amused. “And now it's a shabbat challah cutter, right?” He bursts into tears because it has come down to this—a war for the freedom of Jews and the other races of the Earth. I love, too, the moment when Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore), looking on, collects a pound of soil to add to his world collection; Spielberg recognizes that these men have come a long way. The struggle is not over for any of them.



And what are we to make of Captain Miller? He is a Jeffersonian man, both because of his charisma and because he is a man of contradictions. He claims to the younger men in his unit that he sympathizes with Private Ryan's mother, yet he later confides in Horvath that he doesn't think one man is worth any rescue mission. He screams at his men for attempting to rescue a young girl (Anna Maguire) in the crumbling French town of Neuville, since his objective is to follow orders and not waste time by "doing the decent thing." Then, he turns back on his own words by telling his unit to intervene against a German force occupying a radar site, even though it goes against the orders of the mission to find Ryan. “I don't feel good about this,” worries Reiben (Edward Burns). “When was the last time you felt good about anything?” Miller bitterly snipes back at him. And look at the scene in which Miller is forced into the awkward situation of sitting down and explaining to James Frederick Ryan (Nathan Fillion) why they've been sent to find him.

“Well, there isn't any real way to say this,” stammers Miller, “so, uh... so I'll just say it: your brothers are dead. We have, uh, orders to come get you... 'cause you're going home.” Though Miller puts a soft emphasis on the word “home”, the rest of his message to this Ryan feels devoid of care and emotion. His delivery is so coarse and hurtful that even after it is revealed that this is the wrong James Ryan (he's from Minnesota instead of Iowa, and whatever brothers he has are still in grammar school), it doesn't really ease the young man's sadness after already having to endure the earlier news. Miller makes absolutely no effort to apologize, and James Frederick Ryan is left on his knees, sobbing, begging to get home—an opportunity he will not get, even though Miller has just promised it to him (even the cynical Reiben, who has hated the mission from the very beginning, observes Miller’s carelessness with disgust). When the unit finally does locate the real James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), Miller repeats this exact same process all over again, and—as he did with the first Ryan—makes no effort to mention the names of his dead brothers (Sean, Daniel, Peter). Perhaps that is because he hasn't bothered to remember them.



There are brief appearances by recognizable actors in Saving Private Ryan, but none of them are the sort of distracting Hollywood A-list star cameos you may have seen in The Longest Day. Paul Giamatti had one of his first screen appearances in the film as Sergeant Hill, who escorts Miller through the ravaged French town. Dennis Farina emits a fatherly presence as the Lieutenant who assigns Miller the rescue mission. The late Harve Presnell (you may remember him as William H. Macy's wealthy father-in-law in Fargo) marvelously portrays the great General George C. Marshall, and has a truly memorable scene in which he reads from Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby of Boston to remind his officers of the significance of Miller's rescue mission. One of his colonels is played by Bryan Cranston (of Breaking Bad fame); another is played by Dale Dye, who put Spielberg’s actors through boot camp hell in their training for the film. If I had to pick a favorite, however, I'd go for the cameo by Ted Danson, a long way from Cheers in his performance as Captain Hamill, who doesn't share the cynicism of Miller's men and sympathizes with the mission to locate Ryan. “I got a couple of brothers myself,” he tells Miller. “Good luck… I mean it. Find him. Get him home.”

The score by John Williams is valiant in key scenes of observation and dialogue, but Spielberg has the score removed from all of the battle sequences; this is not an action film or a thriller, and no music is needed to set up the violence. Michael Kahn's editing gives us a variety of different perspectives and angles, but never to the point of alienating us from what is happening. Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography drains the movie of its color to accentuate the ugliness of this war-infested atmosphere; you can practically smell the burning flesh at D-Day, the sticky bombs at Ramelle. A lot of Spielberg's typical cinematic trademarks are present here, too. The image of ripples moving craftily through a peaceful pond recalls the ripples in the cup of water in Jurassic Park. Ryan tells Miller that he has forgotten the faces of his brothers; Christian Bale's Jim had a similar problem remembering his parents’ faces in Empire of the Sun. There is even a strange nod to Spielberg’s old Amazing Stories episode, 1985’s “The Mission”, when a lieutenant (Leland Orser) tells Miller about a general getting killed in a plane crash while trapped inside a cockpit.



Spielberg is unafraid to show some of his most heroic characters looking astonishingly vulnerable during the worst moments of combat. Much of this culminates in the final battle at Ramelle, which lasts 25 minutes—roughly the same running time as the D-Day opening sequence. The moment when Horvath is shot in the leg and is forced to retreat, for example, reminds me of just how serious it is to be caught in the line of fire. Later, even the fearless Private Ryan is seen screaming in terror when a flurry of bullets flies straight at him. And there is a terribly wrenching scene in which Mellish is upstairs fighting helplessly, brutally, with a Waffen-SS soldier (Mac Steinmeier) holding a knife; it eerily seems to have been foreshadowed by that scene at the beginning, in which Mellish had broken down over the Hitler Youth knife. There is also that painful moment when Mellish actually tries to convince the soldier... to stop. He actually tries to reason it out with this soldier, and put the entire purpose of the fight to a halt. But the Waffen-SS soldier, who “sings” Mellish into a sort of painless sleep, knows that he cannot stop. They are enemies with the objective of killing each other, and this is war.



But I think that the emotional peak of the film occurs at the halfway point, during the scene in which Captain Miller chooses to release a German POW (Joerg Stadler) even though his men, bloodthirsty after the death of their medic, Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), seek revenge and want to have the POW executed. This scene not only divides Miller's men, it also divides the audience. None of us know what it’s like to have to deal with an unarmed enemy soldier in the middle of wartime; do you release him, or kill him? Do you go “against the goddamned rules,” as Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) jeers, or do you release him and risk putting him back into circulation? At one point, Reiben throws a fit over the political correctness of Miller’s decision, and Horvath, defending Miller, pulls a gun on Reiben, prompting Jackson (Barry Pepper) to pull a gun on Horvath.

Miller, who has seen what happens when innocent people are killed in battle (the GIs murdering the surrendering Germans at D-Day), explains to his men the reasoning behind his decision: “I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel.” But what really brings on the debates over Saving Private Ryan is the conclusion of the Ramelle sequence. Unable to save Mellish from death, the timid Upham is then unable to save Miller from being shot by “Steamboat Willie”—incidentally, the POW that Miller had let go earlier. When Upham finds the courage in himself to take “Steamboat Willie” and his fellow German soldiers hostage, he is so embittered that he shoots Steamboat Willie in cold blood. Troubled by this scene, my colleague Craig Simpson writes, “it's hard to tell what Spielberg means for us to take from Upham's apotheosis. He seems to be aiming for something along the lines of Michael Corleone's turning point in The Godfather—that the real tragedy isn't the person who gets killed but the person who does the killing. If that's the case, however, then why should it matter who shoots Miller? That it does matter in the movie is nothing less than a dubious rebuke of Upham's earlier decency, that he's not really a man until he pulls the trigger.”



Simpson is not alone in his criticisms of this scene. Spielberg is often accused of making Upham’s killing of “Steamboat Willie” appear as if it's supposed to be justified. But to respond to Simpson’s point, I think the reason why the filmmakers have Steamboat Willie shoot Miller (not that he wants to; there's no way for Steamboat Willie to discern, through all that smoke on the Ramelle bridge, that he has just shot the man who saved his life at the radar site) is so that Upham’s senses of right and wrong, in regards to killing, can be put to a test. The previous times in which Upham has failed to kill were times in which he should have. Now that he has to live with the shame of those previous failures, can he still manage to avoid killing at a time when it would be wrong for him to kill? There’s a key moment to look for: in the instant after he shoots Steamboat Willie dead, Upham realizes his mistake, and lets the rest of the Germans go. Spielberg moves the camera forward and provides us with a haunting close-up of Upham's face, enclouded in the white smoke of battle, looking down gravely at Steamboat's Willie's body lying offscreen. It is in that moment when he understands that after his successive cowardly failures, his first kill in the film is not an heroic achievement at all but, rather, a further act of cowardice.



Now, about those bookending scenes featuring an elderly James Ryan (Harrison Young) and his heartbreaking visitation to a memorial cemetery. There’s a lot of fuss about Ryan’s infamous line to his wife (“Tell me I’m a good man”), but after watching the scene again, I think I’m content with this line; the movie is, after all, about “doing the decent thing” and “earning the right to go home.” What I find more distracting about the cemetery scenes is the strange appearance and behavior of Ryan's family members, who react hysterically when he falls to his knees in sorrow at one point; a powerful close-up of Ryan’s face is very nearly ruined by the absurd facial expressions of the actors in the background playing his family members—particularly the bemused looks on the faces of Ryan’s three blonde, teenage granddaughters (wickedly described as “big-boobed women” in a negative critique of the film published by screenwriter William Goldman). But there’s one detail about the scenes with the elderly Ryan that I love: that closing moment when Ryan salutes a fallen comrade's gravestone. It doesn't feel fake. It nicely reinforces the whole point of the film.



Is Saving Private Ryan a pro or antiwar film? Honestly, I don't think it's necessary to ask such questions. An earlier scene has Miller and Upham conversing philosophically about war in the shadows of an abandoned church, and Upham is quoting Emerson: “War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.” Miller acknowledges this is one way of “finding the bright side,” but the quote makes no difference to him, personally. To quote Sam Fuller, “Pro or anti, what the hell difference does it make to the guy who gets his ass shot off?”

Few can argue against the fact that World War II was a necessary war, but Saving Private Ryan refuses to accept the crass, sentimental “message” of previous war films that the carnage was worth celebrating—that such conflicts should be welcomed. What Spielberg instead warns his audiences, more than any other American filmmaker ever has, is that the war was a costly sacrifice. Are we willing to let something like this happen again? To send our boys back to another hell on Earth? And he asks us to consider if our generation has any of that same strength—not strength for another world war, mind you, but strength that we can use to ensure that another world war does not happen again. Spielberg's father, World War II veteran Arnold Spielberg, puts it best on the film's DVD: "I think it's important to keep telling the stories—understanding them, and understanding what the basis for this was. The more you talk about the horrors of the war, the more you are less likely to try to get involved in another one."

There is a scene towards the end of Saving Private Ryan that is easily overlooked. On a second viewing, it takes on an importance of its own. This is the scene in which Miller advises Ryan to try to remember the faces of his brothers by recalling a memorable experience with them. Miller uses the example of his wife tending to a rose bush garden at home to help further his point. Ryan takes Miller's advice, tries it out, and it works. Then Ryan asks Miller if he wouldn’t mind sharing the memories of his wife and her rose bushes. “No,” replies Miller. “No... that one I save just for me.” With further viewings of the film, we look at the scene, observe its quiet brilliance, and then, oh, how devastating it is when we realize that Miller will be taking his memories to the grave.