That and the sheer brutality of actual combat was something Private Ryan captured really well. No matter how realistic the effects might be, most war movies fail to capture the same tone. Lot of directors, and a lot of the audience, for that matter, spend too much time worrying over the guns and the bullet wounds and the explosions, and not enough time on the expresssion of the people.

As tactically inaccurate as that final battle in the French town was made, those hand-to-hand struggles are in my opinion some of the best war movie combat ever filmed. They nailed something you rarely see in other staged footage – the sheer, awful desperation of it. You take a look at their faces and you can plainly see what’s the only thing going through each man’s head, not “Look at me, I’m a badass, I’m a hero, I’m showing off for you” – which is the standard expression of most Hollywood combat scenes, but “God damn it, I want to live! I don’t want to die right here, right now!”

I think it’s a Spielberg touch, or someone he’s hired more than once. Cause you can catch a glimpse of the same in the one combat scene from his recent “Lincoln” movie – a brief hand-to-hand carnage in Passchendaele-like mud, Confederate and black Union troops bayoneting and drowning each other in the mud. You see that same sort of primal expression on all the faces when they’re about to be speared or stomped down under.

It’s definitely a directing thing, what they focus their eye on and what they coach their actors to show. Some, many if not most are all about the spectacle, showing the audience something awe-inspiring.

Some are all about the fight choreography, making it more and more complex and out-of-the-box and original – which quickly oversteps into the realm of fantasy. If you’ve seen Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy as well as the Hobbit movies he’s making, you can see exactly where he fell off the map. His LotR battles were all about the spectacle on the epic scale – the results could sometimes be ludicrous (cavalry trampling a wall of pikemen), but the battles and the sieges looked grand and spectacular.

The Hobbit movies try to echo the grandiose and intricate movements of the huge battles on the scale of a couple dozen fighters at a time – and the results are mind-numbingly, eye-rolling bad, all of the heroes prancing around in their own individual acrobatics show, trick shooting arrows and swinging their swords like a flag dancing routine, and it all looks like some stupid cartoon video game crap.

Elsewhere you get the anti-war filmmakers who are determined to relentlessly make every moment of their movie some heart-rending gothic tragedy, reducing the whole concept of war to melodrama – there’s no room for authentic expression when every character and every action that takes place is being orchestrated to make the audience cry or seethe with rage. It becomes as far removed from reality as the jingoist war’s all glorious crap you get from the other extreme.

Making a good war film is more than just getting the uniforms and the weapons and the “who actually did what” narrative to be technically correct. A good war film needs to capture the authentic tone – something a lot harder for filmmakers to understand and even to research than all the technical details. You could have a movie that recreated the exact sequence of events, used the exact equipment and filmed on location of the original battlefield – but if it can’t covey an authentic tone then it is no better than live-action toy soldiers.

The problem with capturing the right tone is not just that most directors have no idea what the tone of war actually is, but that war is a full-spectrum emotional experience. War pulls on just about everything a person can feel at one time or another, and it shifts from one to another suddenly and without regard for some overarching plot.

War at a particular moment can be magnificent, grandiose, even beautiful. It can forge ties of friendship, brotherhood, even romance – or it can cut them apart. It can be dirty, gruesome, shameful, depressing, tragic. It can be inspiring, exhilarating, even enjoyable – or just plain funny. Some people will find meaning to their lives in war that they never otherwise would have; some will turn into monsters who might have otherwise lived a peaceful, happy life. Some people come back from it better than they were before, and some people come back broken, and of course plenty don’t come back at all. It reveals some of mankind’s greatest displays of bravery and cowardice, genius and stupidity, heroism and barbarity. Some places and some people actually come out of war stronger, richer, more unified – others of course are left in ruins and in chaos. War can at different times be meaningful, absurd, hopeless, infuriating, awe-inspiring, mind-numbing, heart-wrenching, back-breaking – and in between all that, just fucking mundane and boring a lot of the time.

It’s a lot to ask of a filmmaker to be able to capture all of that. It’s also a lot to ask of an audience to make sense of all that when it’s stirred up and dished out with whiplash-inducing suddenness and with no clear rhyme or reason why it might be comical one second and then tragic the next before inexplicably turning funny again right up till it suddenly gets intense and then calm and then hopeful and then sad and so on.

Audiences are used to seeing movies as stories. They aren’t used to making sense of something for themselves; they’re used to following a story that makes sense for them. They’re used to there being some obvious message or moral to take away, and for there to be resolution – conflicts ended, questions answered, character arcs completed.

War, and thus any movie or other medium truly capturing the full spirit of war, is of course not dictated by the familiar rules of stories most people experience – which is why we’re doomed never to have that many truly good war films.

Doc,

I get your point about omitting the PJ from BHD, but that actually doesn’t bother me so much. I understand that the moviemakers have limited time and resources, and can’t include every aspect of any story. I also get why they sometimes have to alter conversations or combine multiple characters into one. But I don’t get why they have to intentionally add things they know never happened.

You’re right about Private Ryan, but on the other hand, real life soldiers often make mistakes that get their men killed. I thought it was pretty stupid to charge uphill against the machine gun nest instead of just using the sniper, but in real life, stupid stuff happens. In Afghanistan I almost got shot in the head by a sniper. After a few shots he hit my gun shield, then stopped shooting. About an hour later, after everything quieted down, one of my soldiers and I were standing in front of the Humvee with our backs to the village the sniper fired from, looking at the impact from the bullet. It took me about two years to realize how stupid that was. At the time it seemed to make perfect sense.

What I liked about Private Ryan is that it captures the chaos of war, probably better than any other war movie I’ve seen. The scene on the beach, where EVERYTHING goes wrong, is closer to reality than any “‘Murica!” movie I’ve ever seen.

I always dislike the hype associated with most modern war movies. I wasn’t impressed with “Platoon” and I thought that Tom Hanks’ character in “Saving Private Ryan” was a tactical moron who got his men needlessly killed (the whole thing was hopelessly contrived to anyone with any actual insight into actual military operations), but of course we were told how “realistic” it was, as if “realism”=special effects gore.

A messed-up operation doesn’t mean the individual guys weren’t heroic. Gotta disagree with the overall message of your comment. I wouldn’t have murdered unarmed civilians either, so I don’t blame the team leader. There are certain things I won’t do, even if it’s the only way to keep myself alive.

Oh, it can make for a fantastic movie if things turn into a complete fuck-up…the problem is when you still try to slap that triumphalist tone on top of it and pretend every bit of it was glorious and heroic.

If I were going to make a film about heroism I’d make one of 21 Sihks who manned a British outpost on the Afganhasitan border and rather than escape choose death while facing 10,000 invading Afghans to give time to their comrades to prepare. Or the Legion at Camerone, where the last six survivors, without ammunition and hope, choose to charge into 2,000 Mexicans rather than surrender.

But I wouldn’t make a film of a royal screw up.

That’s a good question, Joe. Aesop, would you have any insight on this? I don’t know of any, but I don’t know much about the moviemaking world.

Defensor,

I was a little unclear in the Pressfield reference. You think he wrote that story to push a message? What do you believe the message was?

I like your “warts and all” statement. That’s one of the reasons I don’t write my good guys as boy scouts.

Patrick,

Exactly. If the real story was interesting enough to turn into a movie, why screw with it? I also felt ripped off when I watched a supposedly true story that turned out to be shamelessly dramatized.

Vendetta,

Good observations. And I’d be kinda okay with that, if the filmmakers would just talk about the inaccuracies, instead of waking themselves raw over how accurate and realistic this movie supposedly is.