Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) as a Post-Vietnam War Film in Search of Moral Legibility
Saving Private Ryan revived the WW2 combat film and used many of its tropes but is still heavily influenced by the Vietnam War films. This creates structural ambiguity in a film that strives to acknowledge the horrors of warfare while still trying to restore the sense of moral legibility and decency...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
2022-05-01
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| Series: | Transatlantica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/18645 |
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| Summary: | Saving Private Ryan revived the WW2 combat film and used many of its tropes but is still heavily influenced by the Vietnam War films. This creates structural ambiguity in a film that strives to acknowledge the horrors of warfare while still trying to restore the sense of moral legibility and decency that is specific to WW2 and had been lost in Vietnam War films. War ruins convey the quasi-postapocalyptic setting of the film, with a group of soldiers crossing a moral wasteland where savagery is the only way to survive. Yet the film still attempts to rescue the citizen-soldiers traditionally celebrated by the genre from that wilderness by relying on the codes of melodrama and the central figure of the good leader |
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| ISSN: | 1765-2766 |