WAR IS HELL; `PRIVATE RYAN' A TOUR OF REALITY.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Daily News Film Writer

Tom Hanks doesn't look like an action hero. He has never acted the part in a film, either. So the fact that he's playing the platoon captain in Steven Spielberg's brutal new war film, ``Saving Private Ryan,'' offers a telling clue about the kind of movie Spielberg set out to make.

``Saving Private Ryan'' approaches World War II, and specifically the Normandy Invasion, from angles that have never been shown. Spielberg is unsparing in showing the horrors of war, from the slaughter at Omaha Beach on D-Day to scenes of American soldiers shooting surrendering Germans. Patriotism is on display, but it isn't the kind of gung-ho, rah-rah spirit that radiated from movies like John Wayne's ``Sands of Iwo Jima.'' The soldiers here are cynical, hardened and dog tired. More than anything else, they just want to go home.

Unfortunately, many of them won't.

``In 100 years, when people want to know what World War II was like, this is the movie they'll watch,'' says historian Stephen E. Ambrose, whose best-selling books ``Citizen Soldiers,'' ``Band of Brothers'' and ``D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II'' informed much of the action and small details in ``Saving Private Ryan.''

``This is how it happened. People are going to look at this movie and say it couldn't be that bad. I guarantee you it was that bad. I saw on the screen what I've been hearing from veterans for 30 years. I just never thought I'd see it on screen.''

Yet here it is, every detail save for the smell of the battlefield. And in the middle of it is not Schwarzenegger or Stallone or any other beefed-up action star, but Hanks, an actor who embodies Ambrose's concept of the ``citizen soldier,'' ordinary Americans who left their farms and their jobs to go off to war. Like Jimmy Stewart before him, the 43-year-old Hanks has the essence of the everyday, underscored by a basic decency and hard-earned nobility.

``Most of the other war movies are essentially action-adventure movies set with World War II backdrops,'' Hanks says. ``So from that point of view, who would view me as a captain on D-Day? It's like, `Wait a minute. These guys are cigar-chomping, rough-and-tumble, two-fisted guys.'

``And if you're going to do the mythic version of the war, that's fine. But in reality, these were ordinary men like me. They were haberdashers and accountants and iron workers. They were these guys who went down and signed up on Dec. 8, 1941. And they weren't all apple-pie, John Wayne heroes who got off the boats at Omaha Beach and stormed the beach without any problem.''

D-Day carnage

The film makes that painfully clear in a horrific, 24-minute sequence that shows hundreds of American soldiers being shot, maimed and blown to bits after coming off the boats at Omaha Beach. The nightmarish footage is shocking and relentless and, for much of the audience, surprising. For, while many of the Allied landings in Normandy did catch the Germans by surprise, the stories at Omaha and Utah beaches were altogether different. Historians estimate that of the first 5,000 men who hit the beach at Omaha, 18 survived.

Spielberg never hides from the carnage.

``The normal way to make this movie would have been to have a long period of time where you get to know all the characters and figure out who they are and then there's a big battle scene and some people die and some people don't,'' Hanks says. ``Instead, with this movie, right off the bat you're into D-Day and all hell is busting loose and you've got to survive in five minutes. It doesn't explain why these guys are there because it isn't necessary to do so. It's D-Day. End of story.''

Adds Spielberg: ``It took four weeks of filming, six days a week, just to shoot the Omaha landing footage. But we wanted to get it right. I cannot tell you how many veterans came up to me when we were researching this film and said, `Please be honest about it. Don't make another Hollywood movie about World War II. Please tell our stories.' They didn't want any part of the movie if it was going to be just another sanitized version of the war.''

For that reason, we see seasick troops vomiting over the sides of their boats before taking the beach. We see the kinetic chaos of the battleground in scenes that seem almost straight from a newsreel.

And we see death - not in slow-motion, not in merciful quickness - but full of twisted agony, with soldiers retrieving fallen limbs and stuffing their intestines back in their stomachs, writhing bodies being trampled by the next wave.

For the actors, Spielberg's reality tour of the war began early with a seven-day boot camp run by Marine Capt. Dale Dye, a veteran of four tours of Vietnam.

Dye has worked with filmmakers for the past decade to lend authenticity to war movies like ``Platoon'' and ``Born on the Fourth of July.'' Dye's job with ``Saving Private Ryan'' was particularly choice - for him, at least. He make Hanks and other members of the ensemble cast look like soldiers.

Spielberg asked Dye to save any pity.

``I wanted it to be difficult because they're actors,'' Spielberg says. ``I didn't want them to come on the set complaining that they didn't have any carpet in their motor homes. I wanted them to understand that making this movie was going to be a taxing physical ordeal. And even more importantly, I wanted them to understand what it was like to be an American GI. And I thought they needed to go through the wringer a bit to learn that.''

Unhappy campers

Go through the wringer they did. ``Private Ryan's'' actors hail mostly from the independent film world, including Ed Burns (``The Brothers McMullen''), Jeremy Davies (``Spanking the Monkey'') and Adam Goldberg (``Dazed and Confused''). Tom Sizemore (``Heat,'' ``Natural Born Killers'') brings his age and heft as the unit's war-weary, veteran sergeant, and Matt Damon, cast before ``Good Will Hunting'' made him a household name, plays the missing title character. All except Damon - who portrays the soldier the unit is trying to find - had to endure their seven days with Dye.

Mornings began with intense calisthenics and long runs in wool uniforms and 40-pound packs. The actors learned to assemble their weapons and brandish a bayonet. Meals were strictly army rations - beef liver, laced with salt peter, eaten out of a can - and nights were often spent crawling around in the mud during simulated Nazi attacks. And since it rained six of the boot camp's seven days.

Everyone hated it, and at one point, the actors voted to go home. Only Hanks - remaining true to his Boy Scout image - dissented, eventually persuading the others to tough it out, too.

``All I told them was that 20 years from now, they'd look back at this experience and be glad they went through it,'' Hanks says.

For most, it hasn't taken that long.

``Yeah, I hated it and, no, I didn't really understand why we had to do it at the time,'' says Vin Diesel, who plays the unit's tough-talking Italian, Pvt. Caparzo. ``Guys were crying, there were swollen ankles, cuts, bruises and a lot of pain. Basically, we all felt emasculated.''

``But,'' Diesel adds, ``I'll never forget Capt. Dye telling us about the emotional approach to being a soldier. How you'll go through three months of training with a guy, you get close to him more than your wife and then the day comes and you're on the battlefield and he gets killed. And what do you feel? Hurt? Despair? Anger? Rage? No. You feel joy because he got it and you didn't. And then you can't sleep for three nights because you feel the guilt of betrayal.

``Stuff like that really made you think and want to do right by these veterans.''

Several of the cast members still seem haunted by the experience and the movie. Sizemore and Burns say they wept after watching the film for the first time, ``and I was on the set every day, so I knew what to expect,'' Sizemore says. Others, like history buff Damon, admit they're still in awe over the sacrifices these soldiers made so others could be free.

``I asked myself a lot of tough questions after seeing this movie,'' says the 27-year-old Damon. ``My generation is typically portrayed as apathetic. You see people on `Sally Jessy Raphael' complaining they weren't breast-fed long enough. So this movie made me feel pretty guilty for taking a lot for granted.''

That's a message that a lot of people could take to heart. But because of the movie's unrelenting violence, there will be some question about whether it is appropriate for younger ages.

``Well, it is rated R and there's a reason for that,'' Hanks says. ``War is R-rated. Actually, it's worse than that. But I think this movie might be good for kids who have watched violence on television all their lives and played violent video games where they're entertained by people getting their heads ripped off and they think that's pretty cool.

``Maybe they should go see `Saving Private Ryan' because maybe they'll just weep at the end of it. They just might understand that if you make this conscious decision to pull the trigger and send a piece of metal through somebody's skull, it has ramifications that are not glamorous and not really cool.''

``Saving Private Ryan,'' much like a trip to the military cemeteries in Europe, offers a grim reminder of that cold fact.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) SPIELBERG'S WAR

The director aims for chilling realism in `Saving Private Ryan'

(2) Tom Hanks embodies the ``citizen soldier'' who left his farm or job to fight in World War II.