A story with a lot of holes in it

Rating: 5/10 (13 August 2017)

I felt very oddly confused by this movie. Desmond decides to enlist and "be a medic," yet the only medical preparation we see is him on the porch reading a book on anatomy. There is no mention made of any Army training, or any schooling in medicine he may have done before enlisting. I'm unfamiliar with the Army (especially in that era) but it seemed very bizarre that a boy could just "decide" to be a medic and that's all it took. I was also distracted by the end (after the war flashbacks ended). Thought that they should have shown what happened to him when he got home. Was his father still around? Was he proud of Desmond? They did show the still photos of the real Desmond, but it would have wrapped up more satisfactorily if they had concluded the story with a return of the actor playing Desmond, coming back to his home and family.
In addition to these inconsistencies I also felt there was too much emphasis placed on the gore of war. Too many men with gruesomely-missing limbs being dragged around, and so forth. I saw "Tropic Thunder" long before "Hacksaw Ridge" and the wounds in Tropic Thunder, done for comedic value, are almost the same as the wounds shown in "Hacksaw Ridge." I spent all of the battle scenes watching my cat groom his paws because the gore was so over-the-top.
Lastly, was that rope ladder up the cliff really a thing? Why didn't the Japanese just burn it, or chop it down, when the previous troops had left? It seems like it must have been created with cinematic license, because in the real world, it would never have stayed intact. I'm going to go read about this battle now, but that rope ladder was so jarringly stupid that it took me out of the movie quite a bit.
Ordinarily I like a good war movie but this wasn't one.