A Remarkable Story

Rating: 7/10 (12 November 2016)

Putting aside his personal life, Mel Gibson is a great director & has a knack for big scope pictures based on true stories. Now is Hacksaw Ridge the next great thing from the infamous director? Maybe, maybe not.
As I say about a lot of genres these days, we don't get a lot of great war films. We just don't. Free State of Jones, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and even 13 Hours haven't been great. But I was hoping Hacksaw Ridge would reinvigorate the genre, and perhaps reinvent it. To a certain extent, it does. A story about a Seventh-day Adventist who wants to join the army as a conscientious objector makes for a different way of telling a World War II story.
I think the problem here is that the first and second halves of this story feel like two completely different films altogether. The first mainly deals with Desmond Doss' (Andrew Garfield) budding romance with Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer) back at his hometown of Lynchburg, Virgina. I really bought into the cuteness and sincerity of that relationship, but it gets lost entirely in the second half. I think I would have preferred more of a balance between a straight romance story and a straight war film. And not a split down the halfway mark of the film, I mean each aspect sprinkling into each other.
I can't deny how impressive Gibson's ability to direct intense battle sequences is, however. Braveheart has one of the most beautifully shot finales of all time, and there's plenty of that to go around in the battle sequences here. The fact that Doss' beliefs prevented him from being able to pick up any sort of weapon and he managed to save over 70 men during the Battle of Okinawa. The story is remarkable and watching Doss relentlessly saving one person after another when everyone else had left, is definitely inspiring. But I think the rush of it all overwhelmed my enjoyment of the battle, considering the first half is a different film entirely.
Vince Vaughn, Hugo Weaving, and Rachel Griffiths round out the cast nicely and add other levels of emotion to an already fascinating story. But if I had to change something, it would be the pacing and direction from Gibson. If Gibson could have found a way to sprinkle in romantic scenes to the unsettling battle or the other way around, the film would have been more fluid and even. Other than that, this is definitely a film worth seeing in theaters just for the remarkable performance of Garfield alone.
+Cute romance
+Comradery at the Army base
+Performances all around
-Uneven direction, pacing
7.5/10