Movie Review: 'Hacksaw Ridge'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- From director Mel Gibson comes a violent drama about pacifism.
In a way, it's easy to see why Mel Gibson might be drawn to this true-to-life story about a man whose unconventional religious beliefs made him a pariah among his peers.
After all, Gibson spent the nineties and the oughts building his reputation as a director before ruining it as an actor, colleague, and star with his outrageous off-screen behavior.
But Hacksaw Ridge, which finds him in the director's chair for the first time in a decade, is a reminder of his impressive directorial talent.
It's a brutal Australian-American biodrama about a real-life conscientious objector's seemingly paradoxical battlefield heroism.
Andrew Garfield stars as Desmond Doss, a real-life World War II army medic from the Blue Ridge Mountains who, as a deeply committed Seventh-Day Adventist and conscientious objector, refuses to carry or use a weapon or kill, even though he participates in combat because he believes that the war is justified.
As he puts it, he wants to save rather than take lives.
During a punishing basic training, during which he refuses to budge from his no-killing stance – he is, after all, the only soldier in World War II who fights without a weapon – he must endure the taunts of the other soldiers and his superior officers and then undergo a near court-martial.
And during the Battle of Okinawa (which takes up nearly half the film), the Japanese island on which is fought perhaps the bloodiest battle of World War II, he singlehandedly evacuates the wounded from behind enemy lines and, while under fire, wounded by a grenade, and shot by snipers, he bravely saves over 50 soldiers in his battalion.
How? By dragging the wounded men to safety and then lowering them one-by-one by rope down the side of a precipitous ridge and driving himself to this courageous, improbable deed by repeating to himself throughout the ordeal: "Please, Lord, help me get one more."
Consequently, he becomes the first conscientious objector in American history to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.
This is Gibson's fifth film as a director (The Man Without a Face, Braveheart -- which won him a pair of Oscars-- The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto) and it has all his trademarks: religious symbolism, miracles, and extensive, graphic violence that's appropriate and authentic and thus not sensationalistic and exploitative.
Gibson – working from a script by Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan that's based on a book by Booton Hernden -- gets a strong performance out of Garfield as the religious pacifist, who makes Doss's gentle but absolutely unshakeable determination look easy, and solid support from Teresa Palmer as the woman he intends to marry, Vince Vaughn as his tough drill sergeant, and Hugo Weaving as his alcoholic father.
It is in the hellish battle scenes, with their astonishing authenticity, that Gibson's mastery behind the camera is clearest, as he stages and orchestrates violent chaos with such control that his work even approaches that of the first half-hour of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, Saving Private Ryan, which has heretofore set the bar very high indeed.
Hacksaw Ridge isn't subtle and doesn't try to be, but it's absorbing, visceral, moving, and indelible. And it can probably be described as an antiwar film only in the sense that every war movie is essentially an antiwar film.
So we'll refuse to kill 3 stars out of 4. Hacksaw Ridge is a commanding and unorthodox World War II drama in which director Mel Gibson takes the Sixth Commandment – "Thou shalt not kill" -- out for a bloody spin.
