Saving Private Ryan: “We do not hold the beach.”
Within the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan, it was clear that what was taking place on screen was going to make history as effectively as it was portraying it. This was not the first intensely realistic war movie – Apocalypse Now was already almost twenty years old by this point – but there was something so unspeakably raw and unflinching about the graphic sequence of the landing on Omaha Beach that it quickly became the point of comparison for all war movies to come. Whether it was the man nonchalantly searching among the human debris for his own arm (his own arm), or those literally crying out loud for their mothers, not an audience member could leave without at least one of these images fire-blasted firmly into their minds.
The screen is an unrelenting cacophony of screams, explosions, smoke and blood as Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) struggles up the beach, desperately trying to get his men behind the barrier at the top. Forcing his way through the continual thumping blasts and falling bodies– overcome by his own horror just once before fishing his helmet out of the churning red water and pushing on – he finally reaches the soldier carrying the radio. Pressed into the bank, and awash in barbed wire and showering grit, Captain Miller informs their headquarters that they “do not hold the beach.”
Given the shocking carnage that has been unfolding around them for the last thirteen minutes, this simple statement is so obvious that it almost seems laughable. But the fact is it is this sentence that best represents the entire war. Not only does it capture the scale of the defeat of so many of these battles, but it also shows what was demanded of the men who fought in them; though it was the most appalling and traumatic experience imaginable, they were required to do this as a job, and to treat it as such.
The scene itself is as far from understated as possible, and of course, Captain Miller has to shout the actual words above the roar of the shelling and gunfire, but the detached, matter-of-fact nature of the statement itself, spoken in the face of such indescribable brutality, perfectly summarizes both the despair and the utter futility of war.