Saving Private Ryan

1998

Steven Spielberg opens with a half hour on Omaha Beach that reset how war gets filmed, then narrows to a small and strange mission. Tom Hanks plays Captain John Miller, ordered to take eight men deep into Normandy to find one paratrooper, Matt Damon's Private Ryan, whose three brothers have already been killed in action. Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, and Giovanni Ribisi fill out a squad that keeps asking why this one soldier is worth the arithmetic. Shot by Janusz Kaminski in the desaturated style that nearly every war film since has borrowed.