One of my favorite movies

Rating: 10/10 (15 October 2018)

Hacksaw Ridge

The first half lays out the childhood and adolescence of its hero, Desmond T. Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist turned U.S. Army corporal. Set in Virginia hill country in the '20s and '30s, it's shot in the creamy hues of a Norman Rockwell painting, and filled with earnest, Old Hollywood-styled exchanges about violence and pacifism. The second half is set during the Battle of Okinawa, where Doss, who described himself as a "conscientious collaborator" rather than objector, rescued 75 fellow infantrymen injured by the Japanese. The combat pays nearly as much attention to the rending, burning and perforating of flesh as it does to the hero's anguish and ingenuity. Gibson shows soldiers using mortar shells as homemade grenades (as in the climax of "Saving Private Ryan"), shifts into glorious slow-motion to showcase a soldier kicking an enemy's lobbed grenade away, and treats us to the surreal and inappropriately comic sight of Doss towing a paraplegic infantryman on a homemade sled while the man cuts down bushels of Japanese soldiers with a sub-machine gun. All that said, "Hacksaw Ridge" seems aware of its inability to present the horrors of war in a consistently non-thrilling, non-cool way. There are even moments where the film seems ashamed that it can't live up to Doss' example-particularly when other characters question Doss' belief that violence is never justified and that there is no real distinction between killing and murder. What you see on other characters' faces in these scenes is not contempt but incredulity, followed by petulance and finally denial. They can feel the truth of what Doss is saying. But they can't imagine the world being anything other than what it is, a place ruled by brute force and cruelty. The rifles that Doss refuses to pick up are described as girls, women, mates, "perhaps the only thing in life you'll truly love."