Hacksaw Ridge

Some moments Hacksaw Ridge come across as simple and half-baked, but the film works at the emotional level. And it displays perfect work with eye-pleasing visual reminiscent of the Golden Age of Hollywood. But Braveheart went deeper into the character conflict, and the hero’s rebellion was more passionate. Hacksaw Ridge, on the other hand, remains “just” a well-rendered war drama, made more brutal by blood and guts and a hundred violent firefights. Andrew Garfield is good in his best role so far. (30/11/2016)

I would divide this film into two parts like it is for instance with The Full Metal Jacket. However, as opposed to The Full Metal Jacket, the first half involving training is quite boring, but fortunately the latter half is saved by an absolute precise depiction of war that I haven’t seen in a long time. You see, war is depicted in a pretty brutal manner in this film, which is something I had expected to see in a movie directed by Mel Gibson. At times I was even remembering the brutality and efficiency of SavingPrivate Ryan. The only difference being that Hacksaw Ridge was made about twenty years later. It still is one of the best war movies of the past few years and I am glad that Mel Gibson was in charge of this one, who after all his escapades proved that he still has it in him to get famous again, which he actually managed to achieve due to the fact that he was nominated for an Oscar. By the way, try to find out something about the main character, who is portrayed here by Andrew Garfield. To be honest, I didn’t know what to think about him. I think Desmond Doss was pretty unstable psychologically, which was confirmed in the first hour of the movie. After all, the movie showed this on his despotic father and also on the fact that the entire family was part of some Adventist Church of Jesus’ Latter Days and the family really built who they were on their pacificsm. In any case, I appreciate the effort to help people. You could see that even despite his mental issues, Desmond really meant well and it’s nice that Mel Gibson made such a movie about him. The story is truly epic. (21/02/2017)

The rumors that Hacksaw Ridge is a cruel carnage have been confirmed. At least the scene when the protagonists enter the battlefield for the first time is really not for the faint of heart and will probably be talked about for a while. How the film will fare overall, though, I can't say, but I'm afraid a lot of viewers won't be able to stomach this. Mel Gibson is a great director and it shows here not only in the battle scenes, where he allows himself to do some really wild stuff from time to time, but audiovisually overall. The trouble, however, may be that Hacksaw Ridge looks like something from the last century, and not from the 1990s. The hero is more naive and passionate about a good cause than Forrest Gump, the characters are downright shallow at times, and everything here is either black (Dobbs, you're a naive idiot and you're going to get your ass kicked) or white (Dobbs, we'll follow you to hell). Gibson was probably trying to do just that, and if you accept the rules of the game, you get a very good hero story that you may question how much it has to do with reality, but you will enjoy it. But if you don't tune in to the director's wave, you can suffer through Hacksaw Ridge. So watch out! (15/05/2017)

Hacksaw Ridge just premiered in Dublin yesterday and I'm glad I got to enjoy it on the big screen. The film draws the viewer in from the very beginning with a very unconventional performance from Andrew Garfield, I think the boy has a lot of talent in him and will do some interesting things in the future. The first hour is very emotional, beautifully romantic and psychologically intense. The training session is perhaps the best I've ever seen (Vince Vaughn surprised me), it even gets to my favourite court scene, so awesome all round. Once the film moves to the battlefield the rawest war hell ever filmed begins. Mel Gibson gets absolutely unleashed and serves up some very brutal, violent, realistic, gripping, thrilling and captivating action that had me gasping and screaming out loud in the cinema like I haven't in a long time. I was nearly hit by a chill from how perfect it was. An incredible experience where the scares work more intensely than in The Conjuring. Whether the Oscar will be won by a romantic LALALA for women and fa*s will be a big mystery to me. The fact that there were all seniors sitting around me in the cinema who could have participated in the war itself added to my experience. 100% (28/01/2017)

If the child version of Andrew Garfield had been hit in the mouth with a brick at the beginning of Hacksaw Ridge instead of his movie brother, the whole film would have made a lot more sense. I wasn’t really sure how seriously I should take a young man with the face of a divine simpleton who isn’t overly familiar with how interpersonal relationships work, let alone international politics. In any case, the film takes him seriously enough to gradually lose all credibility. Instead, it offers an enormous dose of stupidity. It seems to me that the final Assumption scene wandered into the film from an unaired Monty Python sketch. The concept that forms the basis of the entire film is reminiscent of the theatre of the absurd. To make the hero of the biggest explosion of disembowelled guts and blown-off heads since Saving Private Ryan a very devout pacifist who rejects violence of any kind strikes me as a rather cruel irony. It doesn’t seem, however, that Mel Gibson is aware of that. He doesn’t use the scenes of slaughter (which soon become numbing rather than shocking) to lead Desmond to the realisation that war is a lot more hellish than he imagined it would be (in which case the contrast of the first and second halves of the film would have worked better), but to show how hard the boy will have it if he wants to survive longer than a split second without a rifle in his hand. The creation of a hero who rejects violence is thus paradoxically conditioned by pervasive violence. If his buddies had not been torn to pieces by the bullets and grenades of the savage Japanese (an ethnic stereotype that went out of fashion along with John Wayne), he could not have become a hero. I don’t doubt that someone else will find clear logic in what I myself see as an irreconcilable contradiction, but even if it didn’t seem to me that the film is ridiculous at its very core, I would have a hard time finding reasons to recommend it to anyone as an example of the best of what has been made in Hollywood this year. We have seen powerful and generally uncluttered depictions of the pandemonium of war many times before, and the clear narrative structure and textbook segmentation, thanks to which such films never even start to be boring, are qualities that have characterised American films for many decades. Hacksaw Ridge, however, is somewhat underdeveloped both intellectually and formalistically. 60% (03/12/2016)