Fear War.

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2017)

It's been over a decade since Mel Gibson has been in the director's chair. People have been anticipating his return for awhile now and this year he brings Hacksaw Ridge, a bloody tale about freedom and persecution.
Doss enlists into the army in the hopes of becoming a medic. During his training he is asked to pick a rifle and shoot a target, he refuses. His faith and trust in God deters him from ever holding a gun to kill a man. This does not make him popular with the men who must fight by his side. So why does he want to enlist in the war? He wants to save people and save people he does. Doss' heroics lead him to saving about 75 wounded men during the battle of Hacksaw Ridge, an astonishing and miraculous feat.
i walked away from the film with one thing on my mind. Thank God I never had to experience anything like that. Watching these characters go into battle, made me terrified for myself in that situation. Blindly firing across a barren wasteland, bodies scattered about the ground. Running directly into that gunfire....horrifying. No thank you. I don't have one tenth the courage those men had. Hacksaw Ridge is almost on the same savage and surreal level of the opening beach sequence from Saving Private Ryan. Some of the carnage is hard to watch as limbs are blown off, guts are falling out, people are set on fire. One particular sequence does seem to lean on the more ridiculous side, when an American soldier grabs the torso of a dead Japanese solider and uses it as a shield, as he runs through the battlefield. Some arguments are made that Gibson tends to favour the bloody violence and revel in it. I can see 'some' aspects of this (the aforementioned torso bit) but speak to people that were actually in war and they will tell you that it's pretty darn close to what happened. We don't have many people left who fought in these wars, so please, talk to those people. I wish I had spoken to my grandparents more often about their lives and their history.
Andrew Garfield is Doss, our lead here. He plays there role with a little bit of a Forrest Gump edge. He's innocent, plays dumb a little bit, but always seems to get the job done. He gets the girl, the respect of his allies and superiors and more. Yes, the road there was not an easy one and this is indeed a true story, but I felt the parallels there. He does a decent enough job, but nothing to really cheer about. I was more engaged with Vince Vaughn oddly enough. He does very well here in a non-comedic role. Hopefully he ventures in more dramatic roles in the near future. I feel people underestimate his dramatic roles and once he hit a streak with his comedy films he never seemed interested in going elsewhere. I hope this changes his mind.
The film can be broken down into three parts. Doss' life pre-war, Doss' life training for war and of course the actual war itself. The pre-war segment might be a tad slow for some, but everything Gibson shows us is perfectly arranged for the story and the character arcs. The film is really preachy as well, maybe a little too preachy. I understand that religion is the backbone to the story and the reason why we have a tale as astonishing as this, but with Gibson behind the camera, I felt like he upped it a tad. The juxtaposition of the peace belief by Doss with the violence of the war is a tough one to wrestle with.
Hacksaw Ridge is a great film from Gibson and I hope to see it get some recognition come awards season.