Steven Spielherg has taken Hollywood's depiction of war to a new level. He does it right a

t the start of Saving Private Ryan, in a 25 minute sequence depicting the landing of American forces on Omaha Beach in 1944. This is not the triumphant version of D-Day we're used to seeing, but an inferno of severed arms, spilling intestines, flying corpses and blood-red tides. To those of us who have never fought in a war, this reenactment—newsreel-like in its verisimilitude, hallucinatory in its impact—leaves you convinced that Spielberg has taken you closer to the chaotic, terrifying sights and sounds of combat than any filmmaker before him.

This prelude is so strong, so unnerving, that I feared it would overwhelm the rest of the film When the narrative proper begins, there's an initial feeling of diminishment, it's just a movie, after all, with the usual banal music cues and actors going through their paces. Fortunately, the feeling passes. Saving Private Ryan reasserts its grip on you and, for most of its 2 hour and 40 minute running time, holds you in thrall.

Our heroes are a squad of eight soldiers lucky enough to survived Omaha Beach. Now they are sent, under the command of Captain Miller (Tom Hanks), to find and safely return from combat a Private Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have already died in action. Why should they risk their lives to save one man？ The question haunts them, and the movie.

The squad is a familiar melting-pot assortment of World War Two grunts—the cynical New Yorker (Edward Burns) who doesn't want to risk his neck; the Jew (Adam Goldberg); the Italian (Vin Diesel); the Bible-quoting sniper from Tennessee (Barry Pepper); the medic (Giovanni Ribisi). The most terrified is an inexperienced corporal (Jeremy Davies) brought along as a translator. Davies seems to express every possible variety of fear on his eloquently scrawny face. Tom Sizemore is also impressive as Miller's loyal second in command. As written by Robert Rodat, they could be any squad in any war movie. But Spielberg and his actors make us care deeply about their fate. Part of the movie's power comes from Hank's quietly mysterious performance as their decent, reticent leader (the men have a pool going speculating about what he did in civilian life). There's an unhistrionic fatalism in Captain Miller; he just wants to get the job done and get home alive, but his eyes tell you he doesn't like the odds.

The level of work in Saving Private Ryan—from the acting to Janusz Kaminski's brilliantly bleached-out color cinematography to the extraordinary sound design by Gary Rydstorm—is state of the art. For most of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg is working at the top of his form, with the movie culminating in a spectacularly staged climactic battle in a French village. The good stuff is so shattering that it overwhelms the lapses, but you can't help noticing a few Hollywood moments. Sometimes Spielberg doesn't seem to trust how powerful the material is, and crosses the line into sentimentality. There's a prelude and a coda, set in a military cemetery, which is written and directed with a too-heavy hand. But the truth is, this movie so wiped me out that I have little taste for quibbling. When you emerges from Spielberg's cauldron, the world doesn't look quite the same.

The movie Saving Private Ryan is up to a new level because ______.

A．it depicts the landing of American forces on Omaha Beach in 1944

B．the landing is not successful

C．it reproduces the terrible pictures of severed arms, spilling intestines, etc.

D．it is a 25-minute sequence