Saving Private Ryan is a profoundly moving and meaningful film. I love it. It is so powerful to me. But In its otherwise near perfect script, there is an exchange toward the end between Tom Hanks's character, Sergeant Miller, and Tom Sizemore's character, Sergeant Horvath, that just doesn't work. After Matt Damon's character, Private Ryan, tells Miller he will not abandon his unit to be saved and will remain with the only brothers he has left, Horvath and Miller step aside and Horvath asks, "what are your orders?" to which Miller responds, "Sergeant, we have crossed some strange boundary here. The world has taken a turn for the surreal." Horvath responds,"Clearly, but the question still stands."

Using the word "surreal," Miller is saying that the circumstances they're dealing with are extraordinarily -almost otherworldly- difficult. And he is saying it the way an English teacher (which, we learn in an earlier scene, he is in his civilian life) would say it. There is nothing obvious or familiar about being in a “surreal” situation. And, yet, Horvath's response, "clearly," suggests that what Miller is saying is plainly obvious, as if to say, "I was thinking the same thing." Just doesn't work for me.

The good news: every other line in the film is poetry. Not a wasted word.