SSC Film Studies

Saving private Ryan

The sequence begins with a close up of Tom Hanks’ character looking very uneasy, the camera then tracks backwards to the other side of the boat with his character always in view, this gives us the idea that he is going to be one of the main characters. As the camera tracks backwards we get to see the rest of the soldiers all shaken and looks as scared as Tom Hanks, because the camera always has him in view this tells us that he is going to be important, but also tells us that he is just like all of the other soldiers and doesn’t glorify him in any way that makes him look more heroic than any other man on the boat.

The camera is moving around in sync with the way the boat is moving to create more of a realistic atmosphere and make us feel like we are a part of that experience as if we were on the boat with the rest of the soldiers.  This makes the scene look more dramatic and makes the audience feel like they are part of the film.

As we get a series of short close up from some of the people on the boat you see some of them throwing up, praying to God and kissing their crosses. This emphasises the soldiers fear and how they have turned to God as sort of a last minute thing in the hope that they are going to survive what’s about to come.

The camera angles are always close up to the soldiers at this point and very tight because this emphasises how trapped they are and how claustrophobic it is on the boat. This makes the audience feel really uncomfortable and trapped too because they are seeing one after another close ups.

The colours of the scene throughout is very dull, we mostly get to see grey of the sky and the brown of their uniform; which emphasises how bad it really is.

When the doors of the boat open, the men don’t even get a chance to step off the boat and they are shot dead straight away. As the men struggle they realise they have nowhere to go and they are trapped, some of the men at the back quickly jump off the side of the boat and swim for cover.

As the men are being shot we don’t get to see any German soldiers only their bunker. This makes the Germans look even more powerful because all we get to see is the struggling Americans and how they are all dying, it doesn’t show a shot of an Germans being injured because it makes the Germans look more intimidating.

The camera at the point where they step off the boat is inside the German bunker pointing down at the American soldiers which makes the American soldiers look very weak because its like the Germans aren’t even fighting a war they are just shooting people, there is no fight at this point because the Germans are hitting the Americans so fast that the Americans aren’t trying to fight back they are just trying to get onto the beach and find some cover to stay alive.

This makes us feel sorry for the Americans because you can see them all dying and trying to find cover and it feels like we are inside the German bunker with the Germans and we are just watching them die.

When we do see the German soldiers they are all hidden in the shadows, this makes the Germans look like the bad ones because we cant see them almost like a villain. You can see how calm the German soldiers look and we see one German in the bunker just helping the other soldier man the gun, this shows how little of a threat the other soldiers are to the Germans because they can afford to have one soldier standing there feeding bullets into another soldiers gun, it emphasises how calm the Germans are actually being.

There is a constant sound of gunfire and explosions the second that the men step off the boat, even when we see Tom Hanks’ slow motion scene and we get to see everything in a little more detail, there is people being set on fire, being shot and having their body parts blown off.