Saving Private Ryan is returning to One this week, with Steven Spielberg’s World War II drama set to air at 10.40pm on Wednesday before becoming available on iPlayer. The 1998 film follows a rescue mission in Normandy, France, after the D-Day landings, as Captain John Miller leads a small team of US soldiers to bring Private James Francis Ryan home safely.
The broadcast gives viewers another chance to see one of the best-known war films of the 1990s at a time when its reputation is already secure. Saving Private Ryan was one of the highest-grossing films of 1998, collected 11 Academy Awards nominations and won five, and earned Spielberg the Best Director Oscar after he had already won for Schindler’s List in 1994. The film also holds a 94 per cent critics’ score and a 95 per cent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, rare numbers for a film so steeped in battlefield violence.
Tom Hanks plays Captain John H. Miller, the Army captain tasked with finding Ryan after the private’s three brothers are killed in action. Matt Damon plays Ryan, while Tom Sizemore appears as Technical Sergeant Mike Horvath, Edward Burns as Private First Class Richard Reiben, Barry Pepper as Private First Class Daniel Jackson, Vin Diesel as Private First Class Adrian Caparzo, Adam Goldberg as Private Stanley “Fish” Mellish, Giovanni Ribisi as T-4 Medic Irwin Wade, Ted Danson as Captain Fred Hamill and Paul Giamatti as Staff Sergeant William Hill. Inspired by Stephen E. Ambrose’s books, the film charts a wartime rescue mission that begins with the chaos of 1944 and never lets up.
That intensity is why the film still draws strong praise nearly three decades later. described it as “An old-fashioned war picture to rule them all – gripping, utterly uncynical, with viscerally convincing and audacious battle sequences.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “The visual masterwork finds Spielberg atop his craft, weaving heart-pounding action and gut-wrenching emotion that will leave viewers silently shaken… If words occasionally fail the picture, the images speak indelible volumes.” The Observer was even more direct, calling Saving Private Ryan “a masterpiece” and saying it cemented Spielberg’s reputation as one of the era’s seminal filmmakers.
For all its accolades, the film endures because it treats the rescue of one soldier as both a military mission and a moral test, set against the brutality of Normandy in 1944. Its place alongside other major war films of the modern era is now fixed. Wednesday’s late-night One showing is not a revival of a forgotten title but another reminder of why Saving Private Ryan has remained one of the defining depictions of war in cinema.
