`PRIVATE RYAN' POUNDS AWAY LIKE GERMAN BLITZKRIEG.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

If you don't want to see the horrible things that combat can do to the human body, then don't go to ``Saving Private Ryan.'' But, if you don't mind seeing it as part of watching a great story unfold, then by all means go.

Simple as that. But the answer to this dubiously overdebated aspect of Steven Spielberg's latest and finest movie is the only thing about it that's simple.

Marshaling all the cinematic skill and storytelling instincts at his formidable command, Spielberg hasn't just made a picture that looks as artfully awful as war can be. He's made an unflinching - and because of that, truly respectful - examination of what it can do to men's behavior as well as their bodies.

More than any war movie I can remember, ``Saving Private Ryan'' shows us how soldiers think, from moment to moment and (though much less often) about the wider, murkier reasons why they're risking their lives and taking others.

And how those thoughts are put into action, running the gamut from noble to appalling, with all the contradiction and ambiguity these tired, terrified and bitterly conflicted infantrymen can muster.

``Ryan'' is significantly set in World War II - the one we fought for all the right reasons - and at the point of our most significant victory. It was also a bloody fiasco: the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach. The symbolic tensions these events represent, between decency and brutality and winning while taking insane punishment, inform every step the movie goes on to make.

First, however, Normandy. In an allied landing craft, men are tense, vomiting, whispering to God (when things really get bad a few minutes later, they'll cry for the more certain comfort of their mothers). A competent-looking captain, John Miller (Tom Hanks), realizes his hand is shaking. It's the first of many conditions he's not going to have much control over.

The landing ramp opens, the front ranks instantly disintegrate, it gets worse from there. Guys drown in the too-deep, reddening water. Those who make the beach lose limbs, guts, minds. The graphic butchery is devastatingly enhanced by trembling, handheld camerawork and desperate, rat-trap cutting (Spielberg's usual brilliant collaborators, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and editor Michael Kahn, do career-best work here).

Just as shocking, though, the cold calculus of war begins to establish terrible order on the blasting chaos. Mental cruelty takes the beach, stoking the agony.

What's a GI to think, crouched behind the iron obstacle that is his only protection from withering German fire, when told the tank trap must be cleared by one of his side's engineers?

And what are we to think when, against ferocious resistance, Miller and his squad's remnants finally force a German surrender, and they - the true champions of freedom, the men who saved the world from darkness, our dads - murder their captives?

Of course, things like this happened. Intellectually, we know the war was won by slaughter. But we're simply not conditioned to think that our GIs, so thoroughly on the side of good in this one, behaved as soldiers under fire, always have and always will. Spielberg isn't out to make ``Private Ryan'' a Vietnam movie in '40s drag, though. These are not symbols of a powerful nation's underlying pathology, They're still courageous, honorable, well-meaning, heroic men - but only men.

The great insight that Spielberg lavishes on every frame, in a kaleidoscope of different ways, is that, right or wrong, all wars place their soldiers on the same ethical frontline. And never with adequate defense.

A few days after the landing, it's discovered that three boys from an Iowa family named Ryan have been killed within days of each other. A fourth son, a paratrooper, is somewhere in Normandy, maybe still alive. Miller's squad is sent into the contested countryside to find the possibly remaining Ryan so he can be shipped back home.

Eight men risked to save one. Is that right? Should Ryan's mother, the kind of thing we're theoretically fighting for over there, suffer more if it can possibly be prevented?

No and, of course, no. Caught in that vice grip of conflicting moral imperatives, what can Miller and company do? Gripe, argue, wonder what the hell they've gotten themselves into, sure. But mostly, they just try to stay alive, do their duty and, if possible, preserve their souls.

Dozens of other unanswerable questions arise before the squad reaches its last stand, a blasted French town where, with a few straggling paratroops, they defend a strategic bridge from overwhelmingly superior, counterattacking Panzers. Even more impressive than the D-Day sequence, this battle, unfolding in close to real time, is a sounding, furious symphony of - more contradictions - confusion and tactical ingenuity, cowardice and bravery, surreal surprise and the grinding advance of military inevitability.

I've never been in war, and I know Spielberg hasn't either, so I'll reserve judgment on whether he approximates it better than a soldier-director like Oliver Stone has. I can say, however, that ``Private Ryan's'' climactic battle left me with a pounding headache, my neck in knots, and emotionally drained like nothing I've seen before. All of that in a good way, of course. But it's the closest I ever want to get to the real thing.

Quibbles can be made about Robert Rodat's script. The men in Miller's squad are types stamped out of numerous war movies past: the gruff, dependable sergeant (Tom Sizemore), the problematic New Yorker (Edward Burns), the Scripture-quoting Tennessee sharpshooter (Barry Pepper), the Italian street tough with a heart too golden for his own good (Vin Diesel).

Only the Jewish Pvt. Mellish (Adam Goldberg), who gets an understandable charge out of taunting German prisoners, and Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies), a meek translator who's dragooned into the mission and generally represents the civilian's point of view, suffer transcendentally interesting moments.

Matt Damon plays the elusive Pvt. Ryan as a more idealized citizen soldier than the men we spend more time with. There have been some complaints that this character's final scene cheapens the movie with simplistic sentimentality.

Arguable, but hogwash. Pvt. Ryan's last words give voice to what every man we've seen in the movie, and what most men who fought the good fight for the good cause, had to think at those moments when goodness had nothing to do with it. It's a perfect coda to this difficult masterpiece, posing as it does the ultimate question that has no easy answer.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Saving Private Ryan'' (R; violence, language).

The stars: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Jeremy Davies.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Robert Rodat. Produced by Spielberg, Ian Bryce, Mark Gordon and Gary Levinsohn. Released by DreamWorks Pictures.

Running time: Two hours, 40 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Four Stars.