International Buyers Have High Hopes for Mel Gibson’s ‘Hacksaw Ridge’

It was Doss’s faith that kept him strong in his non-violent beliefs, just as it was his faith that kept him courageous in battle. But when we’re on the ground, the film flips that notion on its head. Gibson’s taste for plenty of guts with the glory is legendary. Prayer was the only weapon he would ever bring to the battlefield.

That paradox, Gibson says, has to be acknowledged in a movie about a war hero who never fired a shot.

A pacifist’s war story?

Desmond’s Seventh-day Adventist faith and past brushes with violence have turned him toward pacifism, so he joins the Army as what he calls a “conscientious cooperator”, meaning he won’t touch or carry a gun but will eagerly do his part as a medic, saving lives on the battlefield.

Hacksaw Ridge is a rocky slope that serves as a Japanese stronghold that is meant to be destroyed by Desmond’s battalion before the USA takes Okinawa.

These early scenes have an old Hollywood nostalgia to them. Vince Vaughn plays the tough sergeant in charge. He was a Seventh Day Adventist and a conscientious objector, which made him the object of ridicule at home and overseas while serving during World War II. The incredible and tough journey to becoming a solider is only matched by the intense and extremely brutal war scenes.

His resolve was tested most during the bloody Battle of Okinawa.

Garfield does an excellent job as Doss, playing him with a quiet inner strength and kind heart that is irresistible. And they started to wonder about who and what exactly Doss believed in. In the barracks of his rifle company, a no-nonsense drill instructor, Sgt. Howell (Vince Vaughn), moves from soldier to soldier, doling out insults and colorful nicknames to his new charges. In what may be the longest and most intense war battle put to film since the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan, Doss and his company push forward against an enemy that they can not see. However, this is a skillfully made film, one of Gibson’s best.

Mel Gibson’s first directorial effort since “Apocalypto” hearkens back to his themes of faith and the graphic violence seen in “The Passion of the Christ”.

Doss was a very religious man and it should come as no surprise that this is an emphasis in a film directed by Mel Gibson.

But this feels closer to Angelina Jolie’s Japanese prisoner of war tale Broken – proof that stories of great men don’t always make great movies, no matter how loud you turn up the soundtrack. For me, HACKSAW RIDGE is not only a riveting and inspiring true story with great cinematic achievement through authentic visuals, but also a powerful allegory about salvation and the humility, courage, and loving naturethat one should strive toward in order to be that example. There is an instance of a hyper-cinematic “jump scare” that seems jarringly out of place alongside the rest of the film’s war-zone realism.