#71 ‘Saving Private Ryan’
Blood, Brotherhood, and the Redemption of White Male Grief Through War Porn
Saving Private Ryan (1998) opens with a bang—more specifically, with limbs flying across Omaha Beach like confetti at a fascist funeral. Spielberg’s 27-minute D-Day sequence is a masterclass in chaos, brutality, and technical brilliance. It’s also the cinematic equivalent of trauma porn: immersive, relentless, and somehow still patriotic. Because no matter how horrifying the war is, Saving Private Ryan still believes it’s a sacred crucible for forging American masculinity.
The plot is simple. One grieving mother is about to lose all four sons in World War II, and the U.S. Army decides to send a squad of men behind enemy lines to save the last one—Private James Francis Ryan. It's a noble mission built on a sentimental premise: that a single life, when wrapped in the right amount of motherly longing and American exceptionalism, is worth the deaths of many. The question the film poses is whether that’s right. The answer it gives? Yes, but only if you cry about it later.
Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, a soft-spoken schoolteacher turned soldier, tasked with leading the rescue. He’s the moral compass, the embodiment of reluctant valor—until he’s gunned down by the very war that made him noble in the first place. He’s not allowed to survive, because martyrdom is the only acceptable conclusion for sensitive, competent men in combat narratives. His death isn’t a tragedy—it’s a benediction.
The squad? A grab bag of war movie archetypes: the wisecracking New Yorker, the religious sniper, the cowardly translator, the angry ethnic guy. Each is given just enough personality to become emotionally legible before they’re sacrificed to the altar of Ryan’s right to go home and make babies in the Iowa countryside. And that’s the real kicker—Ryan (Matt Damon) barely appears in the film, yet he becomes the receptacle for everyone else’s virtue. He doesn’t earn their sacrifice. He inherits it.
And what of the women? Oh, honey. This is a Steven Spielberg war movie. Women exist in Saving Private Ryan solely as letters, memories, or offscreen mothers in empty farmhouses. They’re the reason men fight, the reward for survival, or the emotional punctuation at the end of someone else’s arc. They don’t speak. They don’t bleed. They don’t get to ask what it means when an entire war is filmed without them.
Spielberg shoots the film in desaturated tones and handheld chaos, lending everything a sense of grim authenticity. But beneath the grime and gore is a deeply conservative message: war is hell, but it’s our hell, and it forges our heroes. It wants to show you suffering while still selling you nobility. It pretends to question sacrifice while choreographing every death for maximum emotional uplift.
By the end, an elderly Ryan sobs over Miller’s grave and begs to be told he’s “earned it.” But the film doesn’t want you to ask what “earning” really means—it wants you to salute. To weep. To feel patriotic without ever being political.
3.5 out of 5 blood-streaked dog tags
(One for the visceral power of the opening. One for Hanks’ restrained gravitas. One for the technical craft. Half a star for pretending to ask hard questions. The missing stars? Buried in a cemetery of unnamed women, civilian collateral, and every soldier who didn’t get a violin cue or a close-up before dying for someone else’s symbolism.)
