War. How many of us really understand the nature of that word? Sure, we've all ready history books. We've all seen statistics quoted: 20 million dead, 50 million wounded. We've all studied the great battles, learned the names of the heros and the villains. We've taken pictures at the memorials, and seen the lines of spare gravestones. But we don't know a damn about war. When the audience filed out of Saving Private Ryan on its opening night, most of the people--those who hadn't lived it--still didn't know a damn about war. But after a brutal, monstrous assault on their senses, they realized they'd never know. Not unless you've lived the horror, could you ever understand.

If this was the goal of director Steven Spielberg's latest foray into the epic drama, he succeeded. And like anything Spielberg does, he succeeded with ferocious detail and agonizing power. The first and last twenty minutes of this film--beautifully filmed and staged--are deeply moving. They're nauseating, they're jarring, and they make you intensely uncomfortable. If only more films dared to do that.

Saving Private Ryan opens with the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6 1944--D-day. Filmed mostly with hand-held cameras, it achieves stark naked realism. Following the soldiers, fodder for German machine guns, onto the beach, the camera shakes as the men do. It follows them into the bloodied waters of the English channel. It shows their shattered bodies, their limbs scattered on the beach. It shows them crying "mama" as their innards rupture on the screen. It's a surreal experience, with little to compare to cinematically. And as he does in all his best films, Spielberg enraptures his audience. This time, not in beauty, fantasy, or adventure, but in pain. If you're not shaking by the time the Omaha Beach landing concludes, you have no ability to feel. Thrust in with the men, the first twenty minutes of this picture is not watched by the audience--but experienced. There is nothing here that's not raw and pure. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why Spielberg is a master of his craft.

After Omaha, the rest of the picture, until the horrific ending, descends into gushing sentimentally--with occasional flashes of ingenuity and brilliance. The star of the show, other than the director and the images themselves, is Captain John Miller played credibly by Tom Hanks. Hanks, in a subdued yet touching performance is a tired, shaken man. Undeniably honorable and heroic, he's the type of man we'd want to lead not 5 but 5-million men. Miller's goal in the film, and that of his small eight-man company is to find and safely return a Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) from behind enemy lines in France. Ryan's three older brothers perish within days of one another, and the army decrees that his mother will be spared a fourth telegram. The obvious question of the film becomes: "Is one man worth the lives of eight?".

Hanks' company is comprised of a fine cast. The characters, though somewhat two-dimensional, are played in a forthright, and sincere manner. Particularly impressive is Jeremy Davies as the Interpreter Colonel Upham. Weak, frightened, and incapable of killing, Upham's decent morality has little place in a world turned upside-down. And it is his uncalculated and terrified look at war through which we see most clearly.

Still, this film is less about plot than it is about war itself. It is the images which capture our souls. Spielberg's strengths have always been the images: the extra-terrestrial in the bicycle basket, the shark fin in the water, Indiana Jones escaping impending doom, and the Jewish girl in the red dress. If a picture tells a thousand words, then his moving pictures speak a library. This film could have been just as effective without dialogue. The intensity and pain on the men's faces--Tom Hanks earnest, brooding eyes, his awkward painful grin; Upham's fear, his tears--all these things are much more powerful and bring more to bare on the soul than any monologue, any piece of the story unfolded through words.

But Spielberg is true to his "my-films-shall-bear-a-message" form. As if the pictures aren't enough, he can't trust his audience to figure out the messages for ourselves. We're children who must be molded, and he assaults us with everything he's got. After the Normandy invasion, Captain Miller looks at the scene proclaiming "quite a view." As if we didn't realize the horror already. Each character gives his own cliche and occasionally silly banter on the "small things in life that matter." The tag-line of "this time the mission is the man" is chewed over relentlessly until frankly, it becomes the weakest part of the film. And at the end, a solemn salute and words from the old Ryan: "I hope I've lived well enough to deserve what you have given me." This is an obvious attempt to make perfectly clear that we should leave the theatre thanking these men for our freedom and that we should live our lives so as to respect what they've given us. The words are sometimes powerful, and occasionally moving, but they cannot compare to the pictures that stain the screen--the pictures that beat at you until you feel bruised and tired. They force you to feel and think. Spielberg's leaves no room for lazy summer movie-watchers.

And so, as I watched the film, I found myself questioning the essence of war-fare. Why blow a man's head to pieces for the square foot of land he stands on, just to have that land sink into a pool of blood? I was left thinking about Miller and company--why did they fight? These men we're fighting to become heroes, to have their names printed on the covers of newspapers, their faces on magazines. They were fighting so that we, with our comparatively simple lives would be able to go watch movies, and eat popcorn and argue about whether Steven Spielberg films are worthy successors to great films before. They fought so that the only war we'd know was the kind we read about in history books, so that our traumas would not be those of life and death.

As the film was ending, the man sitting next to me in the theatre sighed and muttered to his friend: "I've never been so uncomfortable at a movie in my life." Let's hope so. War shouldn't make you comfortable. It should make you sick to your stomach. In popular culture--where violence is treated so benignly--this genuine, gut-wrenching masterpiece will probably earn Spielberg an Oscar. And for making me so incredibly uncomfortable, he gets my thanks.