The unlikely movie Steven Spielberg called a companion piece to ‘Saving Private Ryan’: “In a strange way”
World War II is a subject that’s fascinated Steven Spielberg since he was a child, and it’s a time period that he’s returned to regularly throughout his career.
Two of his best movies unfolded during the conflict, and even though they’re completely different from each other, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan are equally powerful cinema classics that won the filmmaker an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’.
One thing they do have in common is that they zero in on the human cost of the war, albeit in very different ways. The former shines a light on a rare show of compassion during one of history’s darkest moments, while the latter plunges audiences into the ear-shattering heat of battle as a ragtag group of soldiers set out behind enemy lines to ensure that one mother doesn’t lose all of her children.
Of course, those two titans are hardly the beginning and end of Spielberg’s onscreen infatuation with World War II, even if Band of Brothers is a much better example of his ongoing interest than 1941. That’s without mentioning The Pacific, Masters of the Air, the original Indiana Jones trilogy, and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, all of which he either directed or produced and are steeped in the iconography of the time for various reasons.
However, none of them were named as direct relatives of Saving Private Ryan by the man himself, and his candidate for its cousin came from an unlikely source. For one thing, it was a modern story, not to mention a blockbuster sci-fi headlined by the biggest movie star on the planet, narrated by Morgan Freeman, and adapted from a book first published in 1898.
“In a strange way, I wanted War of the Worlds to be a little more of a cousin to Saving Private Ryan in the genre of sci-fi,” Spielberg told Emanuel Levy. “I mean, it is more of a story told through a first-person point of view, so I did impose limits, and David Koepp imposed his limits. We shaped the screenplay so that all the characters would seem as realistic and normal as we are. That was very important to me.”
Not many people would look at Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds and immediately come to the realisation that Spielberg saw them as two peas in a pod, but after he said it out loud, it does make a little more sense.
They’re both stories rooted in family, whether it’s Matt Damon’s title character being protected at all costs to save his old dear even more bereavement or Cruise’s Ray Ferrier trying to outrun an alien invasion to keep his kids safe at all costs, not that they’d be the first duo that springs to mind if anyone was seeking a double bill of perfectly paired Spielberg pictures.
