Starring:	Tom Hanks
	Ed Burns
	Matt Damon
Director:	Steven Speilberg	Colour

And so we return once again to the forties with Uncle Steve. This has much to live up to, after the peerless Schindler's List and an advance buzz that suggested that the multi-Oscar winning classic may have just found a peer. That it can't quite deliver is thus a major disappointment, and almost overshadows the fact that it is still nevertheless very good. After a brief modern day prologue, we are thrust back to Omaha Beach, 1944, with a shock. An extremely badly conceived beach raid, part of D-Day, finds Tom Hanks in charge of those American troops who survived the carnage. But rather than move off to take more ground from the Nazis, Hanks receives new orders from way up there at "the top". Somewhere back in the US of A, a Mrs Ryan is about to simultaneously learn of the deaths of three of her four sons, all fighting apart in the war. It is up to Hanks, and his squad of eight men, to find the one remaining son, lost somewhere in France, and (if still alive) get him sent home to momma, where he can presumably drink her lemonade in peace. All the performances from the ensemble cast are good, although Hanks doesn't seem quite as at-home as usual. The script in turn provides some strong characters (if one is a little to cartoonish initially), and plays its theme of sacrifice for a nobody-you-know-nothing-about extremely well. Less successful structurally is the opening bloodbath - true, it is shockingly graphic but, with no frame of narrative reference, seems to have made its point way, way beyond its enormous length. And here is the other main problem - that of the direction of Speilberg himself. Whilst Schindler was purposeful and steady, this seems self-conscious and erratic. Battle scenes are shot not only from an on-the-ground perspective, but also with a myriad of cheap film stocks and jerky fast shutter speeds, presumably in an attempt to make it all look like the old newsreels or something. The overall effect is actually gimmicky and distracting, drawing attention to itself as a film, rather than history or a story. To compound the problem, having established this supposed "hyper-realism", Speilberg then pulls back and gives us a traditional war story shot in a traditional way, with even a few cliches in tact. That's certainly not to say it's not a good story, however, and the best part is that there's much here to fuel those conversations on the way home from the piccies. The climactic sequence is edge of the seat stuff too yet, strangely, the whole film is just not the overwhelming experience you might expect. Yes, war's horrible, and WW2 particularly so. But after the powerful and moving Schindler, we need something a little more than that. Even Speilberg's Indiana Jones told us that "I hate Nazis"...