Command Pressure.

Rating: 6/10 (24 July 2017)

Director Mel Gibson has produced a nifty story of a small-town religious boy, Andrew Garfield, who enlists in the army, is ridiculed and beaten by his cohort because he refuses to carry a rifle, but nevertheless achieves heroic stature on Okinawa by becoming a medic, staying behind and saving several dozen wounded soldiers, alone, unarmed, and in grave danger every moment.
Garfield delivers in the principal role. He LOOKS like a small-town religious boy with his overgrown thatch of hair, small stature, and vacuous grin. His support varies. One or two of the dilatory suits are pretty ugly folks.
Gibson is unable to avoid several clichés. The slow motion deaths are particularly distracting. I blame Kurosawa for first using it in "Seven Samurai," Arthur Penn for using it with relish in "Bonny and Clyde", and Sam Pekinpah for going stratospheric with it in "The Wild Bunch." Several incidents are lifted from "Saving Private Ryan." It's very gory too but maybe that befits a story about an intrepid medic. I notice the shattered bodies have been criticized by some other reviewers but, according to memoirs by combat veterans like Paul Fusell and William Manchester, that's what a battlefield looks like. Not just dead bodies but parts of dead bodies as well.
There's an ominous element in all that blood though. Perhaps the most tense and frightening scene of combat in World War II appeared in "Pride of the Marines." Three men manning a machine gun at the Battle of the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal, one shot dead and the other two wounded severely, and not a drop of blood is shown. Very little blood in "Platoon" either. Not until "Saving Private Ryan" are we treated to death up close and butchery galore. This one tops "Saving Private Ryan." I hope we're not on one of those treadmills where directors try to out-do one another in bloodiness.
But anyway this is a believable and compelling true story of a guy who went overboard in doing just the opposite of what warriors are supposed to do. Good on him, as the Aussies would say.