This is not the first film to be made about the D-Day landings but it is the first film about the 2nd World War to be made in an era where filmmakers have at their fingertips the technological armoury to create the arsenal of special effects characteristic of blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and Titanic.
This quotation is interesting in that it mentions the age in which we now live where anything is possible when it comes to making films. An interesting question would be "Could Spielberg have made Ryan if he had not had the use of CGI or digital sound editing?- Some of the sound's choreography would certainly be horrendously difficult to achieve with the equipment of the time. Abbey Road Studios, the biggest studio in the UK, only had an 8-Track recording system by 1967. The sheer amount of sound (both in volume and intensity) in the D-Day sequence is tremendous. As it happens, Spielberg is lucky to be able to put on film whatever his imagination wants to, the same applies to Gary Rydstrom, the Sound Designer.
By recent standards, Steven Spielberg directed the most visceral portrayal of war to hit the silver screen - Ryan has set the standard and style of war films made since its release. Its influence can be seen in the following films - Gladiator (2000), Band Of Brothers (2001), Black Hawk Down (2001) and We Were Soldiers (2002) are among films that share its aesthetic features. Sound in particular has been influenced in numerous ways. All the above films are primarily naturalistic in their sound design. Attention has been paid to the timbres of the sounds of battle; gunfire, explosions, ricochets. They also share small moments of Internal Sound': small scenes where we hear the sounds that a character hears. Black Hawk Down contains a hearing loss scene (similar to the one in Ryan) where the sound mimics what Ewen McGregor's character hears (or does not) when he is too close to an explosion.