Steven Spielberg: Brilliant, Iconic, and Well Worth the Price of Admission

In the history of cinema there have been thousands of people to sit in a director's chair. Some have done so with brilliance and poise, others not so much. While luck can also play a huge role in whether or not your film soars or tanks both commercially and critically, there are a lucky few who sit in a pantheon of truly great cinematic directors. To me there are two names that stand out in American cinema for having had the most consistent commercial and critical success, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. It's insanely difficult for me to choose between the two, but if a gun were put to my head I'd have no problem spitting out Spielberg's name, with no disrespect to Scorsese.

If Science-Fiction is your cup of tea, then Spielberg would take the edge over Scorsese right away. With "E.T." and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" Spielberg spun two incredible tales that had a strong SciFi undercurrent but that also had true depth and spoke to human emotion quite masterfully. "E.T." remains one of the few films that can consistently bring me to tears with every single viewing. Throughout his career Spielberg has shown his deft hand at weaving emotion into stories that typically are devoid of any real depth.

In "Jaws" Spielberg showed his innate ability to roll with the punches and create a film that is probably more haunting than it was initially on paper. Technical difficulties with the mechanical shark that was to be the star of the film forced Spielberg to shroud the eponymous character in quick-cuts and illusion, creating a villain far more creepy and terrifying than any mechanical shark could ever be. A master artist must have the ability to change direction mid-journey and still create something memorable. Clearly Spielberg has that talent in spades.

Action-Adventure lovers know Spielberg's genius from a little film series starring Harrison Ford as an archaeologist by day and globe-trotting treasure hunter by night named for his dog. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" single-handedly resurrected the genre and elevated it to levels heretofore never seen. This is actually a very common theme with Spielberg's best films. He has the ability to take a genre that historically may be very one-sided and through masterful shooting, editing and source material he can inject three-dimensional characters and story arcs that transcend all other films of that particular ilk.

Speaking of transcendence, you cannot discuss Spielberg's career without putting two films on display that almost transcend the medium of film entirely. Both films center around World War II and the dark subjects that inevitably come up when placing a story's plot within that time frame. Both of these films are among my all time top 15 but ironically I've only seen each film three times a piece. The films are that much an emotional experience that it takes a real girding of the loins to get through them.

"Schindler's List" is a study of both the vile and inspiring sides of the human spirit. Oskar Schindler himself is the embodiment of this dichotomy of soul. He is no way a genuinely heroic figure, but he did what he felt he could to help, or at least a fraction of what he could do to help, and it gave Liam Neeson a chance to give his best performance of his career. Spielberg's treatment of this subject is done with such an artistic stroke that I cannot possibly see how any director could have made that film on iota better.

With "Saving Private Ryan" Spielberg once again gave us a story that was placed smack-dab in the middle of the most important war in the history of the human race. In doing so he created a war film so real, so authentic that veterans of the second world war in attendance were regularly having flashbacks and were having to be ushered out of the theater. The "needle in a haystack" element of this film infused it with a sense of urgency. Though none of the men charged with finding Ryan thought this was worth undertaking, they took to it with as much dedication as they had to any other mission they'd been given. Tom Hanks delivers my favorite non-comedic Tom Hanks performance in this film, and absolutely lays the viewer to waste with his final scene.

This article has only touched a small portion of the films Steven Spielberg has directed in his illustrious career Spielberg has managed to have success in every decade since the 1970s, and sometimes he's had as many as six or seven bona fide blockbusters in each of those decades. For his prolific contributions to the medium, and because so many of those contributions were masterpieces, he gets placed in the top slot. But if I wrote this article tomorrow maybe it'd be Scorsese...