Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection His efforts were rewarded: “War and Peace” took home the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival, the Golden Globe for best foreign film and the Academy Award for best foreign language film. - Rachel Seo The film, which was one of the most expensive films made at the time, also shot in 70-mm instead of the standard 35-mm, a decision that Variety in 1965 called “brilliant.” Bondarchuk overcame casting difficulties and various filming disasters to craft a movie now remembered for its enormous ambition beyond what any audience member had witnessed before. As director - and one of the leads, playing Pierre Bezukhov - Bondarchuk commanded legions of actors to bring his vision of Leo Tolstoy’s 1867 novel to life, at one point orchestrating over 10,000 extras to recreate the Battle of Borodino. This masterful Napoleonic epic directed by Sergei Bondarchuk marked a watershed moment in the history of Soviet cinema, releasing in four installments between 19 after a production that spanned 6 years. Yet on the 25th anniversary of “Saving Private Ryan,” it’s worth noting that the defining yardstick of a great war movie is the moral complexity at its heart: not just the depiction of war but the understanding of war in all its fear, horror, blood and compulsion, its violent pointlessness and also its need, at times, to exist. Most of the films on our list contain indelible sequences of combat. But it also showed war to be a hell that was (sometimes) necessary. And this lent Spielberg’s film a singular and spectacular ambivalence. Yet “Saving Private Ryan,” which built on the dizzying, you-are-there battle-field authenticity that had been brought to the screen by Kubrick, Coppola, and Stone, made a statement that couldn’t be categorized as “anti-war.” That’s because it was about a war that needed to be fought. The Vietnam movies were all about how cataclysmic and terrible and “insane” war could be. Many, if not most, of the greatest war films - like, for instance, “Paths of Glory” - are often characterized as “anti-war.” The reason is obvious: They’re message movies that depict the horrifying devastation of war, all as a way of saying, “The human race must figure out a way to stop this unfathomable cruelty.” You could say that’s the message embedded in every movie about the Vietnam War - the era when combat in film attained a new, searing, at times hallucinatory realism. Yet it’s worth noting just why Steven Spielberg’s wrenching combat masterpiece has earned such a singular place in the cinema of war. It’s a movie that figures high on our list of the 30 Greatest War Films. Twenty-five years ago, on July 24, 1998, “Saving Private Ryan” was released.
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