While Saving Private Ryan’s opening scene is one of the most memorable in cinema history, viewers often misremember the movie’s actual first scene. Director Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is one of the most critically acclaimed war movies of all time. The 1998 drama follows a group of soldiers tasked with tracking down the eponymous private after the Normandy beach landings. Its story brings together an astounding ensemble cast for one of Spielberg’s most memorable movies. A framing device sets up the movie’s story as an elderly soldier looks back on the movie’s events decades later.
While the real soldiers who inspired Saving Private Ryan did exist, the movie’s framing device often leads viewers to misremember a pivotal part of the movie. One of the most famous sequences in Saving Private Ryan is the opening scene, a sustained depiction of the Normandy beach landings that doesn’t spare viewers from any of the war’s horrors. A bloody, brutal melee, the Normandy beach sequence is frequently highlighted as one of the movie’s most important contributions to the war genre and one of the best opening scenes of all time. The thing is, it is not actually Saving Private Ryan’s opening scene.
Saving Private Ryan Is Remembered For Its D-Day Scene
The D-Day landing sequence is one of the strongest scenes in Saving Private Ryan because of its intensity, immediacy, and unrelenting impact. While Spielberg is hardly a director that many viewers would associate with hardcore horror, Saving Private Ryan’s deeply upsetting D-Day scene is undeniably hard to watch. Saving Private Ryan’s most harrowing scene comes later, but the Normandy beach landings are notable for their deconstruction of many war movie clichés. Characters are executed without fanfare or killed by stray bullets, and one soldier is even killed almost instantly after celebrating the fact that a bullet narrowly missed him.
The D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan faithfully depicts the callous disregard for human life that is an intrinsic element of warfare, and this goes against many conventions of jingoistic, patriotic earlier war movies. Although Saving Private Ryan’s soldiers are heroic, many of them are killed horrifically and completely unexpectedly in the movie’s earliest moments. The D-Day sequence makes it clear that Saving Private Ryan will not follow the rules of the war movie genre as viewers know it, and it is this scene’s assault on the senses that fans of the film often remember as its opening salvo.
Saving Private Ryan’s Real Opening Scene
The first scene of Saving Private Ryan is actually a much simpler scene of an elderly Ryan walking through Arlington with his family. People tend to forget about this opening, as it is a straightforward introduction to the framing device and not a dramatic, spectacular sequence. Saving Private Ryan’s D-Day landings feel like the first scene of the movie because they mark Spielberg’s movie as a different kind of war film from its predecessors. However, the actual opening scene is a much more muted, less memorable sequence that effectively exists only to set up Saving Private Ryan’s surprising ending reveal.
