Chapter 170: The Viewer's Perspective

The film began, and the audience in the screening room fell silent. All eyes fixed on the large screen ahead, ears tuned to the swelling soundtrack.

At first, the firm, sharp cadence of a snare drum approached from the distant dust of a bygone war. A distinctively metallic military bugle replaced the classical trumpet typically used in symphonies. Accompanied by a low hum of human voices, the score spoke in tones of deep gratitude and remembrance. Like morning light piercing through the mist, it flowed seamlessly into the heart, swelling into a majestic crescendo before fading to a soft murmur.

A faded Star-Spangled Banner fluttered in the wind, the brass drifting alongside it. Through this static shot, the film slowly unveiled its opening act.

An old man walked briskly past the camera. As he stepped into the cemetery, a timely close-up focused on his eyes. The past buried in his memory slowly unfolded, and the windows to his soul gradually brightened.

"Where's the opening battle?" Kunitz frowned, muttering under his breath. "Didn't they say it started with a beach landing? What's all this? This doesn't seem like Duke's style!"

"Yeah," Allen and Jones echoed.

However, what happened next proved the film would not disappoint.

Amid the roar of massive waves, a large fleet of Allied Forces landing craft charged toward the beach. Soldiers leaned over the gunwales, vomiting. The shaky camerawork suddenly gave Kunitz a wave of vertigo, as if he were on one of those very boats, crashing through the surf.

The camera shifted to the interior of a landing craft. An officer's trembling hands betrayed his immense psychological strain. The soldiers showed no heroic readiness to die; instead, they were numb, terrified, or deep in prayer. No one knew if they would survive long enough to set foot on that deadly beach.

The instant the landing craft's ramp dropped, the battle erupted without warning. There was no buildup and no battle cries—only merciless bullets and bodies falling one after another.

War was brutal and bloody, and humanity seemed so incredibly fragile in its grasp. A hail of bullets pierced helmets and tore bodies apart. Soldiers searched the beach for their own severed limbs. After a deafening explosion, the wounded man Captain Miller was dragging was reduced to a bloody half... The recreation of the battlefield achieved a rare and visceral realism.

"This... this is too brutal!"

Kunitz heard the voice beside him and turned to look. It was the young man named Owen, whom he had spoken with earlier. Covering his mouth, Owen stammered, "Is this the real battlefield? There's no unkillable Rambo?"

"There are no immortal heroes in war!"

Though he said that, Kunitz had to admit the war sequence was terrifyingly brutal.

Sitting in the front row, Tom Hanks—having already seen the film several times—focused his attention on Duke's production techniques. Since he had participated in almost the entire shoot and was a highly experienced veteran of the industry, comparing the final cut with his memories from the set naturally yielded some analytical insights.

'It's obvious that Duke used an entirely different editing approach in post-production.'

Tom Hanks was certain of this. In the opening battle, Duke had clearly employed a series of continuous shots to achieve the desired effect, purposely alternating between different focal lengths—like medium shots and close-ups—to present the battlefield.

In particular, to highlight the soldiers' struggles and the sheer bloodiness of the conflict, he painstakingly utilized close-up shots to achieve an incredibly lifelike visual impact.

For instance, as soldiers desperately pushed forward on the beach and in the water, those braving the surf were struck by a frantic barrage of bullets. The close-ups forced the audience to bear direct witness to the tragic scene: bright red blood poured from the wounded soldiers, instantly dyeing the surrounding seawater red before they collapsed and were swallowed by the ocean.

Following this, the camera pulled back, using a medium wide shot to let the audience witness the bloody, tragic spectacle on the water.

War was ruthlessly cruel. In the face of it, human life became small, fragile, and utterly vulnerable.

Even the most oblivious viewer could grasp this from the opening battle. As a veteran film critic, Todd McCarthy was certainly no exception. His expression was quite grim. Though the film had only just begun, it was enough for him to tell that this was a completely different kind of Duke Rosenberg movie from any that had come before.

Remembering the massive promotional campaign—when critics scoffed in their columns, mocking the film as an alien-invasion version of World War II where audiences would see nothing but explosions—his expression darkened further.

The film did feature explosions—endless, relentless explosions—but they weren't just for the sake of blowing things up. A beachhead assault of this magnitude would be a joke without explosions. More importantly, these blasts completely abandoned the exaggerated, over-the-top style of Independence Day and The Rock. While retaining a certain level of visual impact, they appeared exceptionally realistic.

In comparison, Kenneth Turan, sitting next to him, harbored less prejudice, allowing him to examine the scenes from a relatively fairer perspective.

Throughout this combat sequence, Duke Rosenberg clearly discarded his usual production methods. In an unprecedented move, he used documentary-style camerawork to depict the war—handheld cameras to capture the landing, waist-high tracking angles, erratic and shaky framing, personal facial close-ups, combinations of fast and slow motion, and the montage technique of overlapping edits to seamlessly stitch together fragmented, run-and-gun shots...

Everything combined to construct the terrifying reality of the battlefield, forging the film's uniquely expressive visual language.

The extensive use of handheld cameras kept the framing mostly parallel, or at a forty-five-degree angle relative to the subjects. This perspective, closely resembling how the human eye naturally observes things, made the people, objects, and events on screen far more authentic and believable.

Anna, a film production graduate from New York University who had spent time working as an assistant director in Hollywood, shared the exact same sentiment.

Following a perspective almost identical to that of a soldier, audiences like her and Aerin were thrust right onto Omaha Beach by the director, Duke Rosenberg, completely immersed in the overwhelming terror of the gunfire and the brutal, bloody reality of war!

"This doesn't feel like a Duke film at all!"

Although Aerin Lauder had braced herself after watching the trailers, she still couldn't hide her astonishment.

There were no gorgeous wide-angle shots, no massive sweeping panoramas, no dazzling camera movements, no razor-sharp edits, and no flashy explosive special effects...

If she hadn't been absolutely certain the director was Duke Rosenberg, Aerin would have sworn this was someone else's work.

Yet she wasn't disappointed. The movie was as captivating as ever, even if the sheer amount of gore was slightly nauseating.

"Aerin, you should be happy for him!"

Hearing her friend's words, Aerin looked confused. "For who?"

"Duke Rosenberg, of course." Anna lowered her voice. "Aren't you two friends? In my eyes, his first step toward changing his style is a massive success. This movie might just become his masterpiece."

This was Anna's genuine opinion. The opening battle alone was enough to cement the film's epic tone. As long as the narrative didn't collapse later on, this movie was destined to become a classic among war films—perhaps even the greatest classic of them all.

While Anna and Aerin took advantage of the lull in the combat sequence to whisper to each other, Kenneth Turan continued to analyze the film.

It was hard to call this a Duke Rosenberg-style movie. The shift in style was truly undeniable.

Clearly, Duke Rosenberg felt that massive sweeping shots could not effectively convey the true horror of war. Thus, he made sparse use of wide-angle lenses to showcase the entire battlefield. Strictly speaking, he only spliced in a single panoramic shot as the battle drew to a close—the camera slowly panned from the soldiers who had secured the beachhead, moving across a shore littered with vehicles, landing craft, and corpses, before finally freezing on a dead body with a backpack bearing the name "Ryan".

Aside from that, the film relied heavily on medium shots, medium close-ups, and extreme close-ups, such as Captain Miller's trembling hands and the tense, terrified faces of the soldiers. Duke Rosenberg placed these intimate shots right on the silver screen in front of the audience, rendering the combat deaths so shockingly real that they became almost too much to bear.

Here, death arrived suddenly and swiftly. There were no unrealistic flukes, no heroes springing back to their feet after being shot, and no triumphant dying counterattacks. Amplifying these moments of death easily made viewers feel the sheer fragility of life, conveying the terror and tragedy of war, as well as the fall of humanity.

Using the brutality of combat to express an anti-war message was not a fresh technique, but Duke Rosenberg executed it brilliantly.

Even Todd McCarthy, sitting nearby, had to admit that Duke Rosenberg had made a profound change. Judging by this opening sequence alone, it could likely be considered a successful one.

The most prominent example was shot duration. Todd McCarthy clearly remembered that the average shot length in Duke's first three films never exceeded 2.5 seconds, and long takes were exceedingly rare.

Yet in this sequence, he utilized an abundance of realistic long takes, with the average shot likely stretching over 7 seconds. Although this sacrificed the sharp, kinetic energy brought by rapid cuts, it allowed for an uninterrupted presentation of the battle, drawing the audience seamlessly into the frame and fully immersing them in the film.

What also struck Todd McCarthy was the editing. The young director had clearly abandoned his previous style of logic-defying cuts, returning to the ranks of logical editing. The shots in this sequence were not held long just for the sake of length; instead, they adhered to reasonable principles of logical editing, cutting only when an action concluded or when transitioning to another point of interest.

Even with his prejudices, Todd McCarthy never felt forced to accept the visual information during the transitions. The cuts were perfectly natural and fluid.

Even though his personal opinion of Duke Rosenberg was as poor as it could be, Todd McCarthy had to silently admit that the young director had made tremendous progress. His directing skills had achieved a qualitative leap. This was especially evident in the ensuing scenes, where Duke Rosenberg's handling of emotional expression—formerly his greatest weakness—was simply astounding.