War Story And Spielberg example essay topic

Assignment #4 According to the author Tim O'Brien, people tend to readily accept the 'facts' presented of what happened during a war. People do not consider the existence of fallacies regarding the actual stories of what happens in wars, few consider that the 'facts' of an incident often change through people's words. The film 'Saving the Private Ryan' by Steven Spielberg features both facts and seeming ness part of the war story. Since it is so difficult to fully describe a war using human language, Spielberg ended up revising his stories to make sense out of it. Spielberg included parts that did not occur or exclude parts that did occur in order to make their stories seem more credible. According to Tim O'Brien's text "How to tell a True War Story", he suggests that people must break out of listening to traditional war stories and scrutinize unbelievable and contradictory aspects of war stories, which is a more accurate way to obtain the truth about a war.

Spielberg in his movie follows some of his path but also choose not to follow his path on some of the parts. According to Tim O'Brien, the narrator must talk about unbelievable aspects of war that contradicts many traditional features in telling a war story and Spielberg is no exception. When the ships arrive at Normandy beach, German soldiers kill many American soldiers. Spielberg starts out with showing pan shots of the battlefield so the reader can gain the knowledge of what's going on and see the whole picture. Viewers of the movie were also able to see the movie from German soldiers eye. Tom Hanks who is the main character couldn't believe his eyes.

He was shocked that those cruel scenes were happening right in front of his face. Spielberg also stops the music and makes the screen kind of blurry to instill a sense of reality to the atmosphere. This definitely added more reality to the movie. Tim O'Brien said credibility might be threatened by telling an unbelievable story but this unbelievable aspect of the movie adds more credibility. The way he shot the film almost gives us a feeling that we were watching a documentary about war.

These are the aspects Tim O'Brien exactly talks about in his text. Spielberg includes unbelievable aspect to his movie but he does not lose the credibility as Tim O'Brien states on his text. O'Brien states that although the normal parts of the story are what seems to happen during the war, and it is quite different from what has really happened but those two cannot be separated. Spielberg also includes normal scenes and seeming ness scenes on his movie, which cannot be separated.

O'Brien asserts, "What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed". (O'Brien 78) Basically, he is saying that people tend to believe whatever the narrator includes in the story even though it is not true. The scenes at the church from the movie can be true but most likely; Spielberg made it up that part. Because no one was there to observe the truth, he had to come up with some sort of scene to gain viewers' credibility.

Since it looks very plains scene, people tend to believe that really happened. Specially, the angle the movie is taken from even make the viewers think they were part of the scene because it was taken from one of the soldier's eye. Therefore, the truth of an incident and what seems to be the 'truth' must complement each other in order to tell a true war story.