The speech delivered by Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan is objectively bad, but there's a reason Steven Spielberg decided to keep it in the movie.
Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT In Saving Private Ryan, Matt Damon's character tells an awful story that feels out of touch with the rest of the movie's great writing, but the ins and outs of the terrible speech explain how and why it eventually made the cut in Steven Spielberg's epic.
Considering that Saving Private Ryan is widely regarded as the best war movie ever made, the scene clashes with the overall value of the film and makes for an oddly dull dialogue sequence in an otherwise witty screenplay. While it could be easily dismissed as a blunder on the writers' part that ended up being included for a lack of better options, the uninspired speech was neither scripted nor a shabby way to get the scene over with.
Matt Damon's Improvised Story Worked For His Character As surprising as it sounds, what ensured Damon's impromptu story's place in Saving Private Ryan is precisely its lousy quality. The speech is delivered by James during a conversation with Captain Miller, who encourages him to picture a memory with his brothers.
As Bart writes in his account of the behind-the-scenes of Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg himself acknowledged that "the ad-libbed speech was neither profound nor insightful", but that this is what made it seem "true to this oddly unformed kid who was fated to be at the center of this mission". Ultimately, the story works precisely because it sounds like something an average immature boy would find funny, which is what Damon's character is all about.
By not making James special in any way, Spielberg subverts the audience's expectations and crafts a scenario in which life is ruled by chance and everything feels meaningless, especially at war. In this respect, Damon's clumsy improvisation ends up unintentionally serving the movie's purpose.
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