Saving Private Ryan/YMMV

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• Award Snub: The film lost the Best Picture Academy Award to Shakespeare in Love due to lack of advertising. Guess which film people remember more these days.
  • Lampshaded and complained about by John Oliver of The Daily Show.
• Cliché Storm
  • More like Seinfeld Is Unfunny.
• Decoy Protagonist: While the film is really Private Ryan's story, at the end, it feels more like Corporal Upham's story.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: As an extremely bloody and realistic war movie the natural expectation is that it would work solely as an anti-war movie by showing the horror. However, there is a non-trivial section of the audience that found the (lavishly shot) action scenes exhilarating, even glamorous. These reactions are far from mutually exclusive.
  • Of course, your opinion may take a 180 degree turn when the medics try to stop a soldier from bleeding out, or during the Telegram scene.
  • And despite showing the horrors of war the Allied soldiers are still shown as heroes who need respect. Yes, some of them may be frightened at times, suffer from nervous breakdowns or seriously doubt the usefulness of the mission, but in the end they all do their duty, some of them dying during the process.
• Fanon: Many people who saw the film were confused as to whether the German soldier that kills Corporal Mellish is also "Steamboat Willie". They are in fact, different soldiers. The soldier that kills Mellish has Waffen SS lapel insignia, while "Steamboat Willie" has the lapel insignia of an enlisted soldier in the Wehrmacht Heer. It doesn't really matter what you yourself think - if they were the same person it adds a little interesting twist, and if you felt bad for "Steamboat Willie" you can feel he survived the war.
  • If you go along with the idea that they're the same guy, it adds a layer of harshness considering that it was Upham who defended him at the radar station. Then he returns and...
    • Except that we KNOW Steamboat Willie doesn't survive. He's right there among the POWs before Upham, and after a brief exchange in German, recognizes the one of two Americans who has shown him mercy. He gives a softened, defanged, and almost pitiful "Upham!", outright recognizing and in the same moment attempting to appeal to the one US soldier he ever connected with personally. And then Upham fires. Granted, the shot is done so that we don't actually SEE who he fires at, but instead of remaining ambiguous, the film shows the remaining Germans present...and there's Steamboat Willie. With his face in the dirt. And dead.
    • And if you feel sorry for him, just remember that it was Steamboat Willie that shot and mortally wounded Captain Miller.
• Misaimed Fandom: As discussed on the main page, many ignore the message that War Is Hell and only like the carnage on the war scenes.
• Nightmare Fuel: See here.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The storming of Omaha Beach. It's been praised, especially by WWII vets who were there, for its accuracy yet it looks very little like what movie audiences have come to expect from a big battle (except for the massive casualties).
• Retroactive Recognition: A lot of the younger actors, especially Matt Damon and Vin Diesel, were not yet megastars at the time this movie came out. Matt Damon had won an Oscar (albeit for Best Screenplay), but it may yet have been a flash in the pan. Spielberg is rightfully credited as helping jump-starting Diesel's career, writing the role specifically for him after seeing Diesel in his acclaimed short film.
  • And also, his Oscar is for writing. Hardly a guarantee of a career as an actor.
  • Jeremy Davies (Cpl. Upham) is Daniel Faraday in Lost.
  • Nathan Filion as Private James Ryan #1 ("James Frederick Ryan, Minnesota").
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Both on the giving (it's not the first movie to use a documentary-like depiction of war or realistic carnage, but the first popular one) and receiving ends (the influence on war movies or battle scenes in general, complaints about the patriotic\emotional tone of the scenes after Omaha Beach).
• So Cool It's Awesome: Considered by many to be a cinematic masterpiece.
• Tear Jerker: See here.