The beginning of this movie— even having no context from the actual story at all, seeing (who later learn is) Private Ryan break down as he enters the graveyard tells you everything you can expect from this movie.
Though when it returns for the ending it's more powerful, as you now know what happened. Hard to keep still when he salutes Miller's grave.
Private Ryan: Tell me I'm a good man.
As he's speaking the the grave, he mentions he wasn't sure how'd he feel coming back to Normandy. Ryan was so shaken up by the events that it took him decades just to visit the cemetery.
That cemetery in Real Life is a Tear Jerker all its own. Just row upon row of crosses and stars. Just... damn...
The whole D-Day landing scene at the beginning. Often imitated, never duplicated, entirely tear-wrenching at the seeming futility of it all and the incredible, undeniable vision of death and hell on a beach.
Captain Miller helps a young soldier out of the water, only for the young man to take a bullet to the chest and dies. Miller gives him a touch on the shoulder and gently lets him go, he has to keep going.
The young soldier sobbing while cowering behind a tank trap as bullets fly past him. It's really depressing when you think of how young some of these boys actually were in the war.
Even worse, a few moments later you can see another soldier lying on the ground, with his guts torn out of his stomach, but still alive. He is crying for his mother. This really hits it home that many of those soldiers were by military standards kids, clad in uniforms and thrown into a meat grinder.
Wade successfully stopping the battalion surgeon from bleeding to death, only for a bullet to go straight through his patient's helmet. He than has a freak out, screaming at the enemy soldiers.
The two 'German' soldiers killed while trying to surrender during the landing scene is placed alongside the 'Don't shoot! Let 'em burn!' sequence...but it turns out that the 'German' soldiers were desperately trying to explain that they were Czech conscripts.
A group of soldiers finds a Hitler Youth knife on one of the killed Germans. One of the soldiers claims the knife and makes a quip, all smiles...and then not even 10 seconds later he's sobbing, completely breaking down from what just experienced on that beach.
The scene after the D-Day landing showing a room full of women typing letters of condolence to likely countless families across the United States. The script refers to it as "the paperwork of Death".
To be followed up by a series of brilliant scenes where Mrs. Ryan finally gets all three telegrams on the same day. The imagery was just perfect - from the ceaseless typing of telegrams to the four blue stars on Mrs. Ryan's window. One for each son, three of whom were never coming home. One of the most powerful scenes in the film, moreso because it has no dialogue.
But, in particular, the completely wordless scene in which Mrs. Ryan watches the car driving up the road, goes out to see which of her children are dead, looks slightly uneasy when a senior army officer climbs out, but when he's followed by a priest, her legs just give way under her. Great acting, great cinema.
For those out of the loop, when you received just a telegram, that meant you had lost one son. When a priest turned up, you had lost two. Imagine how Mrs Ryan felt when she learned that in the span of a week, she had lost all but one of her four sons.
When General Marshall says "...that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle."
That's actually a quote from a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to a mother of five during the American Civil War, and it is the impetus for Marshall's orders to bring James Ryan home.
Caparzo's death. He slowly bleeds out after getting hit by a sniper, and that same sniper preventing anyone from reaching him. In a sad subversion to Face Death with Dignity, he's shown to be scared, pleading for somebody to come help him. And before he finally passes, he pulls out a letter to his family, complaining about it being covered in blood.
While the first Ryan they find turns out to be the wrong James Ryan, the way he reacts to the news, bursting into tears and begging to go home, is heart-breaking.
Miller talking to Horvath on the church and remembering some of the fallen soldiers of the platoon before saying that, if getting Ryan out of the battleground alive is the mission that will buy him his ticket to return home, then that is all the reason he needs to pull it through.
When searching through a bag of dogtags taken from dead paratroopers, the squad turns it into a joke, slapping the tags around like shuffling cards, laughing about some of the funnier names, etc (even Captain Miller starts laughing). The whole scene, however, is intercut with paratroopers returning from the front, looking on with the Thousand-Yard Stare on their faces. The way it subtly subverts then plays straight The Dead Have Names trope is what gives it power.
Doc Wade's death. The sound of his crying out for his momma as he bleeds out is about as heartbreaking as it gets.
Particularly since you can spot exactly when he realizes that he's going to die, as well as the other soldiers' facial expressions when they figure it out too ("...m-more... morphine...") and him saying he wants to go home & crying for his mama as he dies. Combine that with his earlier monologue about his mother, and you have a brilliant, but damn depressing scene.
The looks on everybody else is heartbreaking too. They tried so hard to save their friend, but in the end, they had to watch him die.
The line, "Think about the poor bastard's mother," when they're all bitching about why they have to rescue Ryan.
The response ("We ALL have mothers!"), belligerent as it is in tone, just makes the following deaths (like Wade's, which has him even calling out for his mother as his last words) all the more painful to see.
Captain Miller breaking into tears after Wade's death.
It wasn't just Wade's. It the combination of both deaths (Caparzo died earlier) finally getting to him.
Private Ryan refusing to go home because he feels that the men he's serving with deserve it just as much as him, that he's not going to abandon them and they're the only brothers he has left. What's worse is that all except Rice die later anyway leaving him the sole survivor of his unit. Even sadder when you realize that in real life, people suffering from PTSD in the field often refuse to be evacuated for the exact same reasons Ryan outlines in the film.
Ryan's story about his brothers always does it for some. As funny as the story is, throughout the telling of it, Ryan is visibly breaking up about the knowledge that all of his brothers are dead.
The entire scene leading up to Mellish's slow and painful demise. He and Henderson are hiding from German forces. They kill one but Henderson is shot in the throat in retaliation. He struggles to breathe while Mellish fights a German soldier alone screaming for help and eventually Henderson dies. And worse, after a brief struggle Mellish is eventually stabbed to death by his own knife and his last words were begging his attacker not to kill him.
Upham hears their struggle and slowly proceeds his way to Mellish only to break down out of fear. After Mellish dies and the German leaves, Upham breaks down sobbing.
Jackson's death in the church tower not just for how he died (having his skull be caved in and blown apart by a tank shell) but the fact that his last words were to warn Paratrooper Parker (who was with him) to get down only for him to die as well.
Outside, a shocked Miller sees the church tower explode. Realizing that he lost two more people under his command causes him to immediately open fire on the German forces.
Horvath eventually dying from his wounds. Miller's reaction is worse.
"Earn...This..."
Reiben having a solitary breakdown after Captain Miller dies, standing unresponsive, numb to the point that arriving reinforcements have to skirt around him. All the more poignant when you consider at one point he was on the verge of deserting over his frustration with perceived lack of leadership.
that plays over/under the scene