@Frownland (cause I'm honestly interested in how our approaches to action scenes differ)

Shipping Professional Network in London? Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon? Scanning probe nanolithography?

I don't disagree but a great action scene is not enough for me to get behind a bad movie like Saving Private Ryan.

Some People Never Learn.

You are beyond hopeless. Go put a bullet into your brain.

I don't know what movie you're talking about so I can't say, but in general those movies, even the anti-war ones, often carry water for soldiers so that anti-war messages become pro-veteran messages, which encourage you to "support the troops", which puts it into your brain that you should support their wars as well. Not all war movies are like that obviously, and generally the ones that aren't are the more controversial, but in general if a war movie has a battle scene that can be described as "cool" then you should probably be leery of its intentions, even if the intended intentions aren't jingoistic.

Chula, I already know that you like all popular media. You can keep it to yourself now.

That's some gratuitous abbreviating.

Good is good.

We also know that you dislike anything that's popular. It's your only edge.

Do you think Saving Private Ryan could have been saved if it had cut out a lot of the character building moments or the contrived scenes meant to convey the horrors of war (like the dog tag/poker chip scene)? I think a lot of Dunkirk's charm is that it didn't have that much in the way of character building and so the soldiers were allowed to be just random people in uniforms getting shot at, which is a lot less contrived than a movie that spends ten minutes in a church talking about random bull**** that just makes the movie drag on.