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Famous for it’s bloody portrayal of the D-Day landings in 1944, Spielberg’s classic has been a long time coming. Now it’s been released, glitch-free, and we’re left with  the inevitable questions:

Can Blu-ray work its magic once again? Can the violence get any more graphic? Can the explosions get any scarier? Can Tom Hanks’ stare get any more piercing?

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating…

Set on and just after D-Day in 1944, Saving Private Ryan chronicles the journey of a group of US Rangers as they embark on an unusual mission. Private James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon) is the last surviving member of a quartet of brothers, all of whom had been fighting overseas in the epic struggle that was the Second World War. When word reaches the US Department of War that three of the four brothers have perished, it is decided that the remaining brother should be pulled out of front line combat and brought home in order to spare his mother the tragedy of losing all four of her sons.

Tom Hanks plays Captain John Miller, the soldier charged with leading the squad of soldiers sent to find Ryan and bring him off the line safely. They journey from the bloody landings at Utah beach on D-Day itself through the chaos of wartime France, constantly questioning the usefulness of their assignment, given that the lives of eight men are being risked to save just one.

This film is famous for having probably the most exhausting opening 25 minutes of any movie ever made. Director Steven Spielberg creates a truly harrowing, awe inspiring representation of the near-disastrous landing by US troops on Utah beach on 6th June 1945. I remember reading somewhere once that when the sequence was shown to a group of WW2 vets, many of them were actually quite disturbed by the accuracy of his portrayal of the sheer chaos that surrounded that fateful event.

Like owning World War 2 in a box.

When I first saw this film in the cinema back in 1998 I remember feeling roughly the same way. It’s an ordeal watching Hanks and the other US troops battle their way over what was in reality only a few hundred yards, and Spielberg plays it out in what almost feels like real time. You come out of the end of that truly brilliant opening half hour feeling like you have just personally been there.

After that somewhat electrifying first chapter, the pace of Saving Private Ryan slows somewhat as the troops start to dig in, preparing for the onslaught ahead. The rest of the film plays out as a less frenetic, but certainly no less vivid, ensemble piece with likes of Edward Burns, Giovanni Ribisi and Tom Sizemore delivering admirable performances alongside the always reliable, and in this instance really quite superb, Hanks.

The sudden change of rhythm from crazy-ass explosion fest to contemplative morality tale does jar a little and the action is only really sporadic until the big showdown at the end. This comes as a little bit of a disappointment, especially when viewed from the other side of HBO’s (and Hanks’ and Spielberg’s) masterpiece Band Of Brothers, which arguably gets the action to drama balance almost exactly right.

Saving Private Ryan is also a rather long movie, weighing in at a chunky 169 minutes. There’s an argument that the stop-start nature of the film, its tendency to go from second to fifth gear and then back again frequently and rapidly, is actually another masterstroke on Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat’s part, seeing as the business of going to war has, for the ordinary soldier, often been described as “long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”. Boredom’s a strong word for the calmer moments in this film, but it’s not exactly a smooth ride and you can’t help but feel that these pace issues could have been addressed, and that the film could have come in a good half hour shorter and been better for it.

Still, though, Saving Private Ryan is undeniably a classic piece of modern movie making for its scale, its ambition and its human drama.