9/10 Please God let me save one more ...

Rating: 9/10 (30 January 2017)

Brilliant.
Make love not war .
"In peace sons bury their fathers , in war fathers bury their sons"
Not the film I was expecting at all . Having purposely not read reviews beforehand I was expecting a Hollywood war film saying we are American we are great and promoting the glory of war , glossing over alleged war crimes by the allies and just showing the enemy as evil without any balance portraying their enormous losses of some 100,000 Japanese soldiers killed and half the civilian population of 300,000 died as opposed to 20,000 losses on the allied side in total during the three month battle for Okinawa. So I was not expecting to enjoy the film at all and the opening scene confirmed my fear.
However from then on the film took completely different twist. It was a Very sympathetic moral personal journey of the main protagonist sympathetically played by Andrew Garfield . Excellent supporting cast particularly Hugo Weaving as the father .
You grow to really admire Private Doss as do his colleagues eventually , his undoubted heroism shows that there is more than one way to be patriotic . I'm not going to go into more detail so as not spoil the plot but will just say this is a blood and guts war film for people who do not like war films as well as a war film for those who like action with a romantic twist to boot.
The set of Maeda escarpment was excellent and cinematography revolutionary in terms of Its realism and with some irony was similar to the battlefield of Gallipoli , a film that starred Mel Gibson the excellent director of Hacksaw Ridge .
The best three films of 2017 so far have ALL been based on true stories LION , SULLY and HACKSAW RIDGE
If like me you were thinking this wasn't your sort of film don't hesitate , go see it , only two films have surpassed this in 2017 and none of them were Lalaland !