(Credits: Far Out / DreamWorks Pictures/ Paramount Pictures)
Mon 11 August 2025 18:15, UK
As one of the greatest war movies ever made and one of the finest achievements in Steven Spielberg’s incomparable career, there can’t be many people, if any, who watched Saving Private Ryan and thought to themselves, “That kind of sucked.”
The movie is a rollercoaster of action, emotion, anguish, and poignancy from the first to the last minute. Whether the ear-shattering and pulse-pounding D-Day sequence, the nerve-shredding final battle, or the quieter, more introspective moments between the characters, it’s an indisputable classic.
Because it became the highest-grossing World War II film in history, won five Academy Awards, was egregiously robbed of ‘Best Picture’ by Shakespeare in Love, and continues to be celebrated almost three decades later as the benchmark for boots-on-the-ground filmmaking, it’s easy to forget how Saving Private Ryan was pitted against Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.
‘Twin films’ are a recurring phenomenon in Hollywood, and two high-profile auteurs helming war stories with ensemble casts that were released months apart made it inevitable they’d be lumped into the same conversation. However, Malick’s first feature in the 20 years since Days of Heaven was a different beast.
Sure, there were superficial similarities between them, but whereas Saving Private Ryan favoured shock and awe, The Thin Red Line was more thematically ambitious, experimental, and philosophical. Spielberg may have crushed Malick at the box office, but they ended up competing head-to-head for six Oscars.
Unfortunately for The Thin Red Line, it won nothing and was defeated by its so-called rival for the prizes for ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Cinematography’, ‘Best Editing’, ‘Best Original Score’, and ‘Best Sound’. Both walked away empty-handed for their writing, although the former was competing for adapted screenplay, and Saving Private Ryan was in the running for its original script.
Still, each film had an Oscar-nominated screenplay, but one actor was adamant that The Thin Red Line blew Spielberg’s masterpiece out of the water on that front. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it didn’t do Dash Mihok’s biases any favours that he ended his assessment by revealing he’d failed his audition for the latter’s title character.
“I didn’t think Saving Private Ryan had a great script,” he told Steve Goldman. “I mean, I kind of think the script sucked basically. I think it was a great film and a great Spielberg movie, but this script blew Private Ryan out of the box. And by the way, I read for Matt Damon’s part, Private Ryan, which I didn’t get.”
Mihok has more screentime than most of his Thin Red Line colleagues, which still only equates to around five minutes. Having failed to convince Spielberg that he was worthy of being the guy Tom Hanks’ soldiers are dispatched to find, a role that Noah Wyle turned down, he found himself in the rare position of being able to read the scripts for both pictures before they’d started shooting.
Is he being biased because he was cast in The Thin Red Line, is he being biased because he wasn’t cast in Saving Private Ryan, or is he being honest? It’s hard to say with any certainty, but there’s definitely a whiff of sour grapes in the air, because the Ryan script does not suck in any way, shape, or form.
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