A Montage of the Same Thing for Over 2 Hours

Rating: 7/10 (6 December 2016)

Hacksaw Ridge follows a man who joins the army with the intention of not killing anyone, and how he goes about doing that.
The pacing for this movie is excellent. When I left the theater I figured it's been about 100 minutes long, give or take. But turns out it pulled off a 139 minute run time. It kept itself going, and it made it that much easier to enjoy.
Andrew Garfield as Desmond Dos was pretty great. He's not fantastic, but come Oscar season he'll probably get some buzz. Everyone else does a good job too, but Garfield was the standout of them all.
The violence is very graphic and pretty realistic. It's largely underglorified, which is a good thing when it comes to war movies. Plenty of characters go for heroics throughout the movie, and I can't say whether or not that's entirely realistic, but it does glorify the violence from time to time, and it kind of takes the audience out of the movie due to the tone it already set for itself.
My biggest and really only problem with the movie is that it's just a montage of the same thing over and over. It's just one giant war montage, and by the end I felt largely unsatisfied, like nothing had really even happened. In a way it's pretentious, in that it acts like it was some big deal when in actuality it was just one of many battles fought during the war. I'm not saying what happened wasn't important, but it wasn't as big as the movie makes it out to be.
Overall Hacksaw Ridge is pretty good. It's the kind of movie that I probably wouldn't watch again, nor would I buy unless I found it for $2 at a Pawn Shop or something. Its one of those movies. In the end I'd still recommend it, but I don't think it deserves the praise that it received, and had I known how much I'd like it I probably wouldn't have paid to see it in theaters.