Every characters pain seems to be represented in one persons scream, throughout the war/battle scenes most of the injured or wounded soldiers are carrying on with their duties unless incapable of doing so, the only soldiers who have had to stop with their orders are either the dead or those who are paralysed and therefore can’t move, this is done to give a greater effect as it symbolises the pain they are suffering more than it would if every soldier who had been injured screamed.
The character of Captain Miller is played by Tom Hanks and part way through the confusion it seems as though Miller is observing everything instead of taking part in fighting for his country, it’s as if he has been temporarily deafened, some terror is seen in Miller’s eyes when he picks up his helmet and puts it on his head and the bloodied water streams down his face. This shows that already there are wounded and deceased soldiers. Hanks’ make up has purposely been made to make him look pale and scared of the surroundings he is in. Miller is then brought back from his deafness to reality when a young soldier asks what should he do.
With war there are injuries and death, but in quite a few clips of the film the injured are carrying on with their orders and trying not to worry about their wound, the only soldiers who aren’t fighting are those who were killed. There are several shock scenes in this film; one of them being that the surviving soldiers take the weapons and ammunition from the recently deceased, this is shocking to general people because we don’t know the horrors of war and what soldiers have to go through to survive. Another scene which is used to make people think about the reality of war, was the medical team didn’t have enough equipment to save all soldiers so were prioritising who to treat and whilst treating them using corpses to shelter them because they were getting shot at.
The desired impact on the audience is completely to shock and show the realities of war, because if you are never in that situation you never know what it’s like. I think that what this film shows us is really good because we know what soldiers face during battle and it makes us respect them more.
In complete contrast to Saving Private Ryan we have The Longest Day, which is also a film about the D-Day landings, but made several decades earlier when the technology for film making wasn’t as high quality as the films are that are made in the present day.
The D-Day landings scenes in The Longest Day don’t feature until an hour into the film and when we finally get to see the soldiers on the landing craft we don’t get see individual soldiers we get very long shots of the boats. This is done so that we don’t sympathise with individuals or feel sorry for them subsequently we take in all sides of the war, getting the British point of view and also German’s point of view. This doesn’t occur in the contrasting film, Saving Private Ryan, in this film we only get the American point of view therefore all our sympathy is towards them.
As mentioned before, there isn’t a lot of footage of individuals, in The Longest Day we see one dead person but the camera shot is long therefore we can’t actually see his injury. Also the use of one corpse is more symbolic because in Saving Private Ryan there are lots of injured and dead soldiers and constantly viewing death the audience are more accustomed to it and aren’t as bothered if they see another soldier die, whereas in The Longest Day it makes the audience sympathise more because you think about the one death as a tragedy more than just a statistic. The whole film has a really light hearted view of the war which fits in with the decade it was made in, because some of the people who would of gone to watch this film at a cinema in the sixties possibly had family members who were lost to the war and it wouldn’t of been right to show a horrific and graphic view of the war, apart from the fact it would have been physically impossible because of technology but it still wouldn’t of been right, also some of the soldiers who had survived the war might of only just emotionally got over it and by showing all these soldiers dying it would have brought all of their most frightening memories back.
The desired impact of this film was to hide the realities of war and to comfort people because The Longest Day portrays the war as not being so bad when in the present day we know that it was.
In one way I think that The Longest Day is better than Saving Private Ryan because Zanuck shows all sides of the war and it makes us realise that the Germans went through exactly the same as the British and that they lost soldiers too, if Saving Private Ryan was to do the same it would be a better film. Both the films are good at showing the war especially as The Longest Day shows some actual footage of the events. If The Longest Day was to come out at cinemas now I can safely say that it wouldn’t be successful and if there was the technology to make Saving Private Ryan in the 1960s it wouldn’t have been shown because it would have made the audiences violently sick. This concludes that both the films are good, but only at the time they were made.
