Example research essay topic: Saving Private Ryan World War Ii - 865 words

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Saving Private Ryan War cannot be faced. It is too dreadful. It is the great emptiness that stands before life, transforms itself into a million shapes of unutterable horror, then returns to mocking silence. It is the nightmare from which we can never awake, because the nightmare is the truth: We die. We die like animals because we are animals. We are all creatures who blindly run until something big and hard hits us and our torn insides spill out and we die.

It was easy to read the message in his entrails, Yossarian thinks in Catch- 22 as he stoops over the whimpering, dying Snowden (Im so cold), his liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs and stomach blasted apart by a three-inch piece of flak. Man was matter, that was Snowdens secret Bury him and hell rot, like other kinds of garbage. For those of us who never went to war, and learned of its horrors only through the reports of those who did or the representations of artists, it is easy to keep the nightmare hidden away. Maybe not so easy with the war closest to many of us, Vietnam. Thanks to our disillusionment with it, and the work of journalists like Michael Herr and filmmakers like Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola, Vietnam flickers in and out of our imaginations as a minor piece of hell, a torn-out fragment from a Bosch painting. But World War II, the Good War, the Heroic War, the war that saved the world, is different.

Yes, we know it was dreadful, but we dont really want to know: Wed rather cling to the image of jutting-jawed John Wayne firing his machine gun at a collapsing line of Axis dummies. After Saving Private Ryan, the myth of World War II will never be the same. Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its brutal reality, creating a phenomenology of violence unsurpassed in the history of cinema. Saving Private Ryan is a very good film, not a great one, but it will forever change the way people imagine the most important event in 20 th century history.

That is no small achievement. The films most extraordinary sequence is its depiction of the landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. It begins with a shot of troops huddled on a landing craft. The swells rock the boat up and down, the air is gray and heavy. No one says anything. A man leans forward and vomits, then another.

There is no gunfire. The camera pans over the mens faces, and the fear that burns in their eyes is made more terrible by the realization that we are not going to be playing by Hollywood rules here, but by the more arbitrary laws of chance that actually govern war. That man there, clutching his rifle and trembling, is not going to be saved because he is praying, or thinking of his children, or because he has been singled out by the camera; he is going to jump into the water, take two steps, be hit by three. 50 -caliber gun bullets in the chest, fall into the water and drown before he can bleed to death. The man next to him is going to duck down behind an anti-tank obstacle and have his legs cut off by shrapnel. The camera keeps looking at the faces. Fish in a restaurant tank.

The landing craft pulls into the shallows, the door drops down. The men move forward and suddenly there is shattering sound: A German machine gun opens up. Everyone in the front line of the boat is killed. Men jump desperately into the water, off the sides. We see one man drop into eight feet of water, struggle desperately for a moment with his 60 pounds of gear, then drown. Now the camera (masterfully handled by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) is running, twisting on the beach, chaotic flashes of light coming from half-seen points on the cliffs, the ground rising up and coming down, explosions going off like dice rolls.

Men are shouting out orders, but we cant make out what theyre saying. Were surrounded by death, jiggled gently in the palm of his hand. Out of the corner of our eye everything seems to happen just beyond where we can quite see it clearly we see a man stumbling along without his arm; he stoops down and insanely picks it up, vanishes. Now were back underwater and everything is silent has it all stopped? and then suddenly were back on the beach, the sky is screaming, invisible pieces of metal are hurtling in from all directions, hitting sand, metal, water, hitting human bodies that scream, cry for medics, howl, die. As if in a hallucination, we keep thinking theres some kind of logic here, some master key.

Over there, its safe over there. Then over there blows up. For an incredible, endless half hour, Spielberg hurls the viewer into the midst of this inconceivable inferno of twisted metal, shrieking shells and human agony. It is a tour de force, probably the most vivid and visceral war scene ever filmed.

Research essay sample on Saving Private Ryan World War Ii