Quote from: Huggs on May 27, 2018, 04:04:52 AMSaving Private Ryan - Blu-Ray. Still good, but it's starting to lose it's impact for me personally. Hard to believe it's been 20 years.
It's a trip though, I remember when they played it "unedited" on regular television once back in the day. It was some special broadcasting, and I can't remember if it was CBS, NBC or ABC. But man, it was just unheard of to hear the F-Word being dropped and see people losing body parts on national television. I can't remember why they played it, but everybody I knew was talking about it and watched it that night. I seem to remember one of the anchors talking about the limited commercial breaks and warning viewers about the content it was going to contain.
That film's rated a 15 in the UK, and to this day I'm convinced the only reason it didn't get an 18 certificate is because of its important historical context, particularly with regards to the opening D-Day sequence. If you had that level of violence and gore in any other movie it would've got the higher rating without question, but because it was such an accurate document of Second World War combat, it got by with a more lenient certificate - one that allowed it to be shown educationally in schools, something I remember happening when I was at secondary. It's also undoubtedly what led to it being shown uncut on US TV.
When it came out though, it was so much more harrowing than anything else I had seen with a 15 rating, I couldn't believe it wasn't an 18.
As a piece of movie-making, it genuinely changed things. There have been countless war films since with similarly-styled hyper-realistic - and graphic - combat sequences, many of which have similarly managed to show some pretty extreme stuff with a 15 certificate (
Band of Brothers springs immediately and obviously to mind), but I certainly can't recall seeing anything even half as visceral and shocking before
Private Ryan came out.
