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Saving Private Ryan (1998)
In Best Director-winning Steven Spielberg's WWII epic:
- the film's opening with an American flag and the
first word heard - "father" as an elderly man knelt at
a tombstone while visiting the war dead
- the gripping, documentary-style, graphically-bloody,
visceral Allied D-Day landing on Omaha Beach (actually filmed on
the coast of Ireland) in the opening half-hour (beginning with a
close-up of shaking hands of a young soldier on a PT boat - later
revealed as belonging to Capt. John Miller (Oscar-nominated Tom Hanks))
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Mass Casualties On Omaha Beach
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- the mission of a unit of soldiers led by Miller to
rescue the last Ryan son (the other three Sean, Peter, and Daniel
had been killed)
- the scene of Miller's revelation: "I'm a schoolteacher.
I teach English composition... in this little town called Adley,
Pennsylvania..." and his concern about how the war might change
him
- the badly-injured Miller's heroic, dying order to
Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) with the terse words:
"James, earn this. Earn it" - his words requested that Ryan
"earn" all of the sacrifices that had been made for him and not let
their dying efforts go to waste, so that he could go back to his mother
- in the film's ending, as a lengthy letter from General
George C. Marshall to Ryan's mother was read (in voice-over) informing
her that her sole surviving, youngest son was alive and returning
home from the European battlefield, Ryan's face transitionally
dissolved or morphed into the face of the nameless, elderly teary-eyed
veteran (Harrison Young) - revealed to be an older Ryan - visiting
the Normandy cemetery at the film's beginning (50 years later) -
at the grave site of Captain Miller
- the older, teary-eyed Ryan asked his wife for reassurance
- remembering Miller's words to him: ("Am I a good man? Tell
me that I have been a good man"),
and uncomprehendingly - she reassured him
- the final image of a back-lit American flag billowing
in the wind
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The Tense Landing on Omaha Beach
Miller to Ryan: "James... Earn this. Earn it"
Death of Captain Miller
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