Saving Private Ryan
Wow. This was such an intense movie. I'm making a separate page for my reaction since I feel like I'll have a lot to say.
A prominent theme that stuck out to me while watching was the seeming futility of war and of specific missions. Almost all of the characters had a moment where they questioned their mission, and questioned if one person's life or one appointed mission was worth all of the casualties that they endured.
Another theme was how one's morals hold up when faced with the gruesome reality of wartime death. Is it "right" to spare a prisoner of war who was trying to kill you or even successfully killed a friend of yours just a few minutes before? When do you humanize and when do you rationalize?
As I was watching I found myself grappling with these questions without coming to a clear answer. Early on in the film I found myself thinking that I would not be a very good soldier, that I would struggle to put myself in danger to serve a mission that I didn't directly understand or care about. But that is the reality of being a soldier. It is built on trust that the people at the top of the chain of command are making the right decisions even if you don't fully understand them. Often, however, their value judgements differ from yours. It seems in most cases that people at the top of the chain-of-command have a more utilitarian view about casualties and consequences of war—willing to sacrifice large numbers of men for missions in service of the broader goal, even if those things are not known with 100% certainty. After all, the main objective of the characters in the film is to achieve a "public relations" mission. We are to assume that the people in charge think that the story of a mother's one surviving son being saved is worth the lives of multiple men. For the viewers, this value judgement seems questionable. How much direct suffering would be alleviated or prevented by the "public relations" story about Private Ryan being saved is impossible to calculate, and the pain to the one mother (even if it meant the loss of her last son) is not comparable to the grief felt by 10s of mothers who lost their sons as a result of the mission. The only reason for the mission was the nebulous "public relations" effect which is the kind of thing that seems unreasonable to the people actually carrying out the mission and having to see their friends fall in battle.
I still don't have a clear answer to these questions. my reaction while I was watching was that the men not believing in the nature of the mission was not morally wrong. I don't think it was wrong of them to value the lives of their friends over the success of the mission. However, I also recognize that the system of war collapses when people follow their own moral compass instead of the one dictated to them by superiors and that it is impossible for all of the men to have all of the information to make decisions.
The film argues that war is ultimately a product of rationalization. As Tom Hanks' character says in one part, he only carries on after losing 94 men because he tells himself that their sacrifice will save 10x or 20x the number of people. My problem with this statement is that he does not know that for sure. In all of these examples, there are so many factors at play that it is very difficult to predict the effect that one decision will have on the outcome of the war. This reality makes rationalizing difficult because the theoretical basis for the rationalization is less concrete than the binary suffering of the other human in front of you. I think what makes the movie great is that it doesn't provide any answers to these questions, but does present a lot of the difficult questions related to war.