They sent a platoon to pull the fourth Niland son out of harm's way he was a young soldier who had parachuted in with the 101st on D-Day. The War Department, still remembering the five Sullivan brothers who all died while serving on the same battleship (which led to the policy of preventing siblings from serving together), was not going to let it happen again. The script was inspired by a true story: the Niland family had lost three of their four sons to the war. He'd previously touched on the war in such films as 1941 (a homefront comedy, 1979), Empire of the Sun (a child's-eye view of survival in an internment camp, 1987) and his acclaimed Holocaust drama Schindler's List, but Saving Private Ryan was his first classical war film, a platoon drama about the experience of American soldiers in combat.

As a young teen, Spielberg and his friends created World War II adventures on super 8 film. His father fought in the Burma campaign in World War II as a radio man in a fighter plane. 'I've had an obsession with World War II,' confessed Spielberg in an interview conducted during the production of the film. In addition, Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation was released in 1998, the same year as Saving Private Ryan, signaling that America was once again ready to eulogize the good war. The World War II histories by Stephen Ambrose (notably Band of Brothers and D-Day) were major non-fiction best-sellers. The 50th Anniversary of D-Day in 1994 brought the cultural conversation back to the sacrifice of American soldiers. It was the first major World War II film in decades and the timing was right. After years of revisiting the national shame of Vietnam in the war films of the seventies and eighties, Steven Spielberg steered Hollywood back to the pride and accomplishment of 'the greatest generation' with Saving Private Ryan (1998).

Good will hunting synopsis