fabio wrote:

Did you know that war is hell and that it's dirty and muddy with muddy dirt everywhere and that soldiers are human and also civilians are human caught in the middle? Donald Kaufman sure does! He's here to do Saving Private Ryan right, without that opening beach scene that everyone hated and with a more boring final battle.


(The thing is literally Saving Private Ryan without the beach scene and worse screenwriting 101 moments)

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:

Steven Spielberg's 1998 exercise in Oscar-mongering is a compilation of effects and impressions from all the war movies he's ever seen, decked out with precise instructions about what to think in Robert Rodat's script and how to feel in John Williams's hokey music. There's something here for everybody—war is hell (Sam Fuller), war is father figures (Oliver Stone), war is absurd (David Lean, Stanley Kubrick), war is necessary (John Ford), war is surreal (Francis Coppola), war is exciting (Robert Aldrich), war is upsetting (all of the preceding and Lewis Milestone), war is uplifting (ditto)—and nothing that suggests an independent vision