276 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
Sound Effects Editing (Gary Rydstrom, Richard Hymns). It also won two Golden
Globes, three BAFTAs, and numerous other awards and received mostly high praise
from film critics. For example, Peter Rainer singled out the Omaha Beach sequence
for special praise: “This opening sequence, in which thousands of men are splayed
and pulverized, is perhaps the most wrenching battle scene ever filmed. It goes
way beyond what we’re used to in war movies.” For Rainer, Saving Private Ryan
“ doesn’t offer up the homilies that have drenched the morale- boosting WWII
movies... By going back to a Good War and focusing so clearly on its carnage,
he’s putting forth the most obvious of positions: War is about killing people”
(Rainer, 1998). There were, however, dissenting opinions. Although Ella Taylor
praised Saving Private Ryan for using “screen brutality just the way it should be
used—to deglamorize the undiscriminating overkill of modern combat, in which
survival is governed far more by dumb luck than by derring-do, and heroism is
beside the point,” she also criticized the film for ending “in a burst of schmaltzy
ritual. [James Ryan], now an old man, falls to his knees in a cemetery filled with
white crosses, then begs his wife to tell him that he’s a good man. With this hope-
lessly cloying coda, Spielberg, having won his battles, loses sight of the war”
(Taylor, 1998). Still, the most damning reviews were by WWII veterans Paul
Fussell and Howard Zinn. A decorated U.S. Army combat veteran (103rd Infantry
Division) but also an intellectual who wrote authoritatively on war (The Great War
and Modern Memory), Fussell praised Spielberg’s 2001 mini- series Band of Brothers
as “au then tic” but found Saving Private Ryan conventional Hollywood fare: “ After
an honest, harrowing, 15- minute [sic] opening, visualizing details of the unbearable
bloody mess at Omaha Beach, [the movie] degenerated into a harmless, uncritical
patriotic per for mance apparently designed to thrill 12- year- old boys during the
summer bad- film season. Its genre was pure cowboys and Indians, with the virtu-
ous cowboys of course victorious” (Fussell, 2001). A veteran of the air war over
Eu rope (Eighth Air Force, 490th Bombardment Group), but also a po liti cal sci-
ence professor (Boston University), author ( People’s History of the United States), and
lifelong social activist, Howard Zinn admitted to being taken in by the film’s
“extraordinarily photographed battle scenes” but further noted that he “disliked
the film intensely. I was angry at it because I did not want the suffering of men in
war to be used— yes, exploited—in such a way as to revive what should be buried
along with all those bodies in Arlington Cemetery: the glory of military heroism”
(Zinn, 1998, p. 39).Reel History Versus Real History
Though widely regarded as historically au then tic, Saving Private Ryan is problem-
atic in many areas, including its famed Omaha Beach sequence. Though it uses
fictional names, the movie accurately depicts the carnage and chaos at Dog Green,
Omaha Beach, where ele ments of the U.S. 116th Regiment, 29th Infantry Division,
and the 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions took extremely heavy casualties from
German automatic weapons fire and artillery and the sea ran red with blood, as the
film shows. Tom Hanks’s Capt. Miller is based in part on Capt. Ralph Goranson
(1919–2012), the commanding officer of Com pany C, 2nd Ranger Battalion. What
the film doesn’t indicate is that this was the absolute worst sector of the landings