The movie, Saving Private Ryan, is a story that begins with a battle in Normandy on Omaha beach where Captain John Miller leads his men to battle. These are American soldiers who are encountering a heavy defeat on the beaches with a few survivors who took cover of a dune. However, the American soldiers overcome various challenges to defeat the German soldiers using Bangalore torpedoes. Meanwhile, in England, Three brothers of Ryan family die in battle and a search is called to rescue Ryan, the last surviving brother. He was parachuted behind enemy lines, a day before the troops landed. Captain Miller together with a small unit of eight men is tasked with the job of searching Ryan. However, the search intensifies when one of the soldiers is shot by a German sniper in a ruined Norman village. Ryan is later found by chance by Captain Miller. Miller tries to convince Ryan to go back home since his three brothers were dead but he refuses opting to stay behind and defend a bridge he had been monitoring with his friends. Captain Miller decides to stay while waiting for reinforcements. During his stay captain miller fortifies their defense city because he knew the Germans would attack. Soon enough the Germans attacked the city that was defended by the small American unit. As the American unit started to retreat from the German attack, the allied planes showed up and made the attackers to flee. Only two men survived out of the eight men who had gone to rescue Ryan. Ryan is finally repatriated back home in America (Bodnar, 2001).
This movie, which was produced in 1998 by Steven Spielberg, is an epic war movie that depicts the invasion of Normandy during the Second World War. It is a movie based on the story of the battle at the Omaha Beach. It gives a story of how the battle was fought and how the Americans won it. It also gives chronological events that led to the battle and how it led to the rescue mission of Private Ryan. It also portrays how the American fighting units were organized and how they operated during this war time. It is an epic war movie that also incorporates an interesting plot in its set up. The movie’s setting also tries to reinforce the story presented by the movie producers of the locations that these events occurred including the Omaha beach, Normandy, Iowa, and other places that were presented in the movie. The story of the movie is adequately reinforced with a pot which tries to portray the theme of the movie that includes courage and patriotism. The story and plot of the movie includes genre elements such as character and setting which categorize the movie into a specific genre. The movie can also be categorized as a drama even those this genre is considered too general. It has all the characteristics of a drama movie considering its fast paced action (Zhou et al, 2010).
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The first genre convention of the movie is it’s the subplot used in the movie. In the movie, the search mission to rescue Private Ryan is the main narrative of the story in the film while the battle at Omaha beach is a subplot related to the main story. The producers of the film used the world war battle scenes to relate to the main narrative of the movie which was the consequential search of Private Ryan by a group of elite soldiers. The second genre convention used in the movie is that of journeys. The movie takes the audience on journeys that have been chronologically recorded in history. It is a depiction of the events that happened during the World War II. It gives a series of events and time periods that such events occurred and what transpired thereafter. The Omaha beach battle scene is a case in point.
The third genre convention that expands the boundaries of this movie genre is the codes convention. In this movie, the audience expects it to only feature war action and nothing else. However, this movie can also be classified as an action movie, a drama, and a thriller. This is because it presents different types of codes which expand its boundaries from that of being an epic war movie to other types of genre (
Kostelnick & Hassett, 2003).
References
Bodnar, J. (2001). Saving Private Ryan and postwar memory in America. The American Historical Review , 106(3), 805-817.
Kostelnick, C., & Hassett, M. (2003). Shaping information: The rhetoric of visual conventions . SIU Press.
Zhou, H., Hermans, T., Karandikar, A. V., & Rehg, J. M. (2010, October). Movie genre classification via scene categorization. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM international conference on Multimedia (pp. 747-750). ACM.
