Overly pious Gibson still delivers war as gripping spectacle with calculated verisimilitude

Rating: 7/10 (16 April 2017)

After ten long years, Mel Gibson is back in the director's seat. Certainly he needed some kind of self-reclamation project given the debacle a decade ago involving some drunk driving and words overheard by an arresting officer that were deemed anti-Semitic. Gibson might be a little like German director Leni Riefenstahl, who for years asked when the statute of limitations would run out on her collaboration as a documentary filmmaker with the Nazis.
Gibson somehow needed a project that would ameliorate the notion of his past narratives infused with hyper-violent tendencies. He perhaps found it in his choice of Desmond Doss, the Army medic awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery during World War II, despite also refusing to pick up a rifle during combat. Ben Croll writing in IndieWire grasps the paradox—he finds that Hacksaw Ridge is "a movie venerating pacifism, made by a man pathologically beguiled by violence."
Gibson however provides a rather chaste back story for his pacifist protagonist, chronicling a childhood replete with an abusive father and an incident which leads to his embrace of non-violence when he almost kills his brother during a fistfight (encouraged by the father). After saving a man hit by a truck, Doss (Andrew Garfield) meets nurse Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer) at the hospital in his home town of Lynchburg, Virginia (Gibson filmed most of this on location in Australia). There's a series of rather perfunctory courtship scenes finally leading to Doss' decision to join the Army.
The action picks up as Doss must endure basic training where he is harassed by his fellow soldiers who don't respect his Seventh Day Adventist pacifist beliefs. He also is singled out by the company drill sergeant who makes an example of him in front of the troops. When he is finally court-martialed for insubordination (failing to obey orders to pick up a rifle), there's a rather unconvincing scene where his father obtains a letter from a brigadier general with whom he fought in World War I, and presents it to the commanding officer at the court martial which leads to all charges being dropped.
Gibson's talents, however, are on display in the combat scenes at the battle for Okinawa. The soldiers are forced to climb up the Maeda Escarpment (also known as Hacksaw Ridge), where they come up against scores of Japanese troops, mostly hidden in caves. Gibson proves to be a master at choreographing the battle, which depicts massive losses of life on both sides.
Doss' heroic achievement is highlighted as he climbs back up to the main battlefield and drags wounded soldiers to the edge of the cliff and lowers them down using cleverly knotted ropes. All the while, the Japanese are a short distance away about to pounce. Doss eventually is wounded himself and just makes it back down to join his already decimated unit.
Despite being highly entertaining, the film exhibits what Christopher Gray writing in Slant Magazine, perceives as an overly pious stance here: "The eponymous 350-foot high ridge itself is a resonant image of Desmond's ascension, and Gibson finds more opportunities to place him in baptismal and Christ-like poses. It's all deeply silly and occasionally risible, but it's also undeniably canny, a throwback entertainment that somehow successfully integrates a lofty sense of piety with an unyielding taste for bloodlust."
Jessica Kiang writing in The Playlist is even more critical of Gibson whom she perceives as a tad bit self-righteous: "But this tale of real-life heroism seems less a celebration of humanist convictions than a glorification of religious intransigence and a declaration of the moral superiority of the faithful over the faithless."
Has Gibson redeemed himself for his own past personal sins? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. The piousness is still there as well as the aforementioned "taste for bloodlust." Nonetheless this is a director who is still quite talented and can draw the viewer in by depicting war as spectacle with a calculated verisimilitude.