The soldiers question the nature of the mission, asking what makes Ryan's life seem worth more than their own. But through the ordeals the men end up obeying the orders, and fighting and even dying for a man they neither knows nor really wants to help.
Saving Private Ryan is regarded as being one of the greatest war films of all time. Many feel the sole point of the film is to show the agony and suffering that comes along with war, the physical aspect of warfare. Others will contend that it was the interaction of the characters that made the movie great. It showed how men react in the face of battle and what goes through their minds as they are witnessing the destruction of life all around them. The stress of battle looms large in minds of the soldiers.
The first of these arguments is best seen in the opening twenty-five minutes of the movie. The D-Day portrayal hits the audience hard as we see the soldiers dying one after another and knowing, as an audience member, that those men who were the first wave off the transport boats had no chance of survival when those transport gates were opened. The images of men being shot, the explosions, men trying to escape fire only to die in the ocean under the weight of their packs and equipment, and the sight of men with limbs blown off searching for their missing body parts. Then there is the look of the ocean water, the blood changing the color to red. It is these vivid images of battle that one must realize that this is not just a movie, but an account of an actual real-life battle. The fact those men went through this hell and gave up their lives in order to accomplish the task at hand has to go through the mind of many an audience member when watching this action take place. The imagery of this movie, in particularly the D-Day scene, never leaves the audience throughout the movie. A scene with such a tremendous sense of reality is hard to forget even when the scene is over.