Born to Kill meets Peace.

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2016)

Do any of you fine people remember Full Metal Jacket? Pvt. Joker in Vietnam has a helmet that features the words "BORN TO KILL" on one part and right by it is a peace symbol. He is asked about it by a superior officer who finds it to be a sick joke, and Joker responds that it's part of the "duality of man, the whole Jungian thing." In that sense, Hacksaw Ridge is the most Jungian war movie ever made, and I'm not sure if that's entirely a great thing. It may be fascinating after the fact, that it could be a film that's worth talking about after it ends, but while watching it this dichotomy is bizarre. I think part of this too goes back to Francois Truffaut's quote about war movies, that it's very difficult, close to impossible, to make an anti-war film when the action itself makes war look like a bloody good action movie.
Platoon was one of the only films to be anti-war and have action in it that was well shot and executed. Hacksaw Ridge isn't that really. Its first half actually does, what I found, a decent and compellingly dramatic job of showing this guy Desmond Doss (sic) and how in his upbringing around a drunk PTSD'd father (a terrific Hugo Weaving) and nearly killing his brother (and, later on we learn, his father too in a fight), it's actually clear to see why he would embrace non-violence so strongly. Even if the guy never picked up a Bible in his life, his experiences inform his worldview, it's just that the word on killing- thou shalt not of course- extends to Doss in a way that is his total conviction. He even has a fairly sweet romance with a girl in the film and all that is fine; if anything the first half of the film, including a training sequence with Vince Vaughn in a role that reminds one how he can do dramatic work (and be funny while doing it), is engaging.
But that second half is where Gibson gets to let loose and get into being BLOODY MEL Gibson (ala Bloody Sam Peckinpah, though not anywhere near Peckinpah's real innovations in filming violence in such an eye and rhythm that revolutionized things, this doesn't do that). The battle scenes here could lay claim to being the most gruesome in the history of cinema - at the least somewhere Spielberg has to be going "damn... that's a bit much" - and maybe some of that is part of who Gibson is as a (sigh) artist, going back to Braveheart and on through Passion and Apocalypto, a man who seems as compelled to show ALL of the brutality the way that Doss was compelled to never pick up a gun, not once. And objectively, this action is intense and, maybe, in a few moments, exciting and intense as hell.
The message of this character can't help but contradict how this filmmaker sees war, and this dichotomy, again going back to that "Born to Kill/Peace" ideal, is taken a little too literally to the point where Mel's/Desmond's man Jesus is taken into account here. Another thing structurally is that Hacksaw Ridge feels its length over almost 2 1/2 hours the most in the final stretch, the last half hour, when Desmond becomes a superhero practically speaking (ironically Gibson in interviews has put down superhero movies of the modern era). Is it true that he saved 75 people at this battle? I take the movie at its word, but there comes a point where it makes its hero SO heroic that it strains credulity. I'm not talking about whether it was true in real life, I mean more-so in the scope of the film's interpretation of it. Not to mention, Gibson *does* indulge in the kind of violence that I have to wonder if the real Desmond Doss would recoil at, including showing a (I think) Japanese general committing Harakiri at the moment of realizing the battle really is over. Uh... okay!
If all you're looking for is a bloody, gory, maggots-all-in-the-corpses-and-there-are-the-rats-too action-war movie, then certainly it's inarguable Gibson delivers, and it's a step up in quality from the (I know I'm alone in this opinion I don't care) schlock that was his last film 10 years ago, Apocalypto. But that split between the hero's convictions, religious or otherwise, and how much this film basically revels in this brutality of the flesh, is hard to take. I felt exhausted by the end of this, for good and bad reasons. 6.5/10