So Jess hadn’t seen this, and since I hadn’t seen it since 1998 when it came out, I watched it with her.

It’s actually better than I remember, is the good news. Spielberg knows how to make movies, and this one really does work as a WW2 movie, and does a good job exploring the fundamental absurdity of its premise.

(It’s also weird in that it has a bunch of people in it who I know who they are now, but didn’t in 1998, so it suddenly became a retro-star-studded cast. Vin Diesel, Nathan Fillion, Paul Giamatti, I had no idea any of them were in this movie, but sure enough.)

But one part of it hasn’t aged well, and that’s all the Greatest Generation America Fuck Yeah stuff. Like, the “freedom” stuff inside the movie is kinda bunk, but it’s mostly in the mouths of military people, so you can accept it as how they would have thought at the time (and then plus, it is against the Nazis, so the bar to clear is low here). But the framing stuff, hoo boy. Really, the fact that the first and last shots are closeups of an American flag waving tells you all you need to know there.

On the whole, I think this is a decent WW2 movie, and an embarrassing time capsule of turn of the century WW2 fetishism.