123. Saving Private Ryan

Cut the beginning and ending of Saving Private Ryan – where James Ryan as an old man visits the graves of soldiers who saved him – and this bad-ass World-War-Two actioner, loaded with movie stars, would be leaner and meaner.

But those bookend scenes carry the essential message: We are all Private Ryan.

The movie is almost entirely flashback, beginning with American soldiers arriving on Omaha beach. When the front of their boats drop open, a high percentage die immediately from machine-gun fire. The ensuing battle kills hundreds all around Captain Tom Hanks. The ocean turns to blood.

Then comes the mission to save Ryan. One at a time, a handful of men on the captain’s team meet death. Caparzo is sniped trying to save a little girl. Their medic Wade takes shrapnel and goes over asking for more morphine, crying for his mama (the second time in this movie a dying man cries “Mama”).

Mining for meaning in these heartbreaks, the captain weighs life’s value. He’s lost 94 men under his command, and decided that each soldier died so two or three or 10 others, maybe 100 others, could live. The mission to find Ryan, eight men risking death to save one, fudges that math.

Because it doesn’t matter how many. One is enough. What matters is how the survivors live. “Earn this,” Captain Tom Hanks says (as he dies) to Private Ryan. That’s a lot of responsibility! But is it too much for the guys who killed and/or died in war to ask, that the survivors earn their sacrifice?

“Tell me I’m a good man,” Old Ryan says to his wife in the bookend ending. She obliges, seeming genuine. The implication: if he was good, then those war deaths were worthy.

We should ask ourselves if we’re good. The men who died saving Ryan are fictional, but 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians died in even worse ways in WW2. Killing and dying while wearing an American flag hasn’t stopped since.

Are we worthy? In 2020 – 76 years after the ocean turned to blood along the coast of Normandy, France – it doesn’t fucking seem like it.

93. Avengers: Infinity War

During a fight in outer space, Thanos throws a moon at Iron Man. Thanos reaches up, closes his hand like he’s crushing something, and the moon breaks into pieces. He makes a throwing motion toward Iron Man, and the pieces come showering out of the sky.

If the best comic-book illustrators rendered this supermove in panels, it wouldn’t top seeing it in this movie. The New York City battle in the first Avengers movie, against an army of aliens, proved Hollywood can do anything now. But it didn’t surpass the books. This moon throw, though, feels special. Even in the effects-heavy era of modern action movies, it’s uniquely spectacular.

But it isn’t the best part of Avengers: Infinity War. You know how you know the best part? More uniqueness: The soundtrack shuts off.

Scourge of the blockbuster has always been orchestral swells. Action movies are packed with scenes meant to play as life-or-death drama. Duh duh DUH DUUUUUH!!! We watch these flicks knowing the heroes will win, so filmmakers have to manufacture tension, convincing the audience (if only for the length of a scene) that the heroes are in danger. Bum bum BUM BUUUUUMMM!!!

The greatness of Infinity War lies not in its next-level action, nor the ensemble cast of A-list actors having fun clacking their popular superpowered characters together. No, the greatness of Infinity War is putting away those orchestral swells. When music goes away, you pay closer attention. It’s confusing, and scary. The quiet subverts expectations. When Thanos arrives on Earth, it doesn’t play as dramatic, per se; it’s scary. Superheroes aren’t usually scared.

The climax devastates, and then the movie ends. The audience knows a sequel’s coming, but Captain America doesn’t. The survivors don’t.

One day we’ll look back on the era of comic-book movies, and each will stand alone. Infinity War will be the shocker. The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight ended nasty, and they are beloved pinnacles. Infinity War is darker than either.

Thanos is a giant with god powers, and even 20 teamed-up superheroes don’t know how to stop him. He transcends villainy.

80. Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino conveniently chops Inglourious Basterds into chapters with title cards. Chapter One: Once upon a time… in Nazi-occupied France, and Chapter 4: OPERATION KINO, are text-book level examples of mounting tension in film, their complications compounding until the pressure maxes and blood splatters everywhere.

Nazis drive onto a farm in the opening scene, from out of the distance. It takes a while. The evil inside The Jew Hunter Hans Landa also seems to come slowly from out of the distance. Chapter one is mostly two men sitting at a table talking. Landa is flamboyantly polite, but his monstrous Nazi soul gradually reveals itself. The frightened farmer’s hands don’t shake as he lights his pipe, so can he keep cool and survive? Halfway through their conversation, a smooth shot takes us under the floor, where Jews are hiding. Landa demonstrates that he knows they are there without ever explicitly saying so. The payoff is devastating, inciting a vengeance that’ll climax with an end to World War II in Chapter Five: REVENGE OF THE GIANT FACE.

In the Operation Kino chapter, everyone in a basement bar – spies included – believes at first that the scene can be calm, even fun. Young people celebrate and play games. Only through careful plotting – including the incorporation of drunks, drinks (“three glasses”), and the game – does the celebration melt down, until the bar explodes in carnage.

Once Upon the Time in the West built harrowing tension by quietly waiting. Characters stare at each other, probing for weakness or a flinch. Tarantino has a better method: conversations with life and death and the fates of nations at stake. Killers deduce each other’s secrets by talking.

Because these characters are fun and interesting – Pulp Fiction’s stand-up-comedian gangster sensibility in a story with way higher stakes – the conversations engross and the actors lock in. A change comes over someone who becomes ready to die; it hardens their eyes as they listen and speak.

When Shosana, the Jew who survived Landa, kisses Marcel at the end, she’s crying. Those tears are earned. It’s sad that they’re about to die. It’s also glourious.