R | 2h 49min | Drama, Historical, War | 24 July 1998 (USA) As the nation prepares to celebrate its 245th birthday this weekend, it is wholly fitting to acknowledge a landmark film that depicted an event which rescued the free world from tyranny over 75 years ago. While the majority of “Saving Private Ryan” is fiction, it uses the June 6, 1944 U.S. landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France as its springboard. It is not “revisionist history” as some of its few detractors have claimed but rather an entirely plausible series of events based on another true life World War II event (the Nov. 13, 1942 deaths of the five Sullivan brothers on the USS Juneau). After a brief, then-present day establishing scene at a U.S. memorial gravesite in Colleville-sur-Mer, director Steven Spielberg, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and editor Michael Kahn assemble what most critics, audiences, and, most importantly—the veterans who were actually there—consider to …