Hacksaw Ridge - Directed by Mel Gibson
The hellish second hour of Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge takes the audience into the front row of an anatomical theatre with the main lesson being warfare. The battlefield is shrouded by thick black smoke that only parts to display disembowelments, dismemberments, and partial decapitations. It’s sick and gruesome. Gibson’s camera shows us a muddy landscape littered with viscera and bombardment craters. Searching through the countless bodies, with a syrette of morphine pinched between his thumb and forefinger is Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) an American medic and pacifist who refuses to touch a gun. He’s skinny and tattered, a religious Seventh-Day Adventist whose faith is worn like armor. Doss was a real man, actually the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor and Gibson shows him first as a penitent, then a pilgrim and finally a saint. Hacksaw Ridge is chock full of religious allegory. Even the titular cliff at the Battle of Okinawa is less a geographical feature and more the entrance to genuine damnation.
Across Gibson’s directing career (Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto) a clear interest can be divined. Human history is full of savagery and the protagonists in each of his films work to redeem that horror by enduring it. Hacksaw Ridge is no exception. Doss arrives at boot camp as an unassuming country boy and is almost immediately met with a true test of his beliefs rather than the physicality needed to be built and callused for war. He’s mocked at every turn and beaten while he tries to sleep for refusing to train with a rifle. The film’s entire first hour is dedicated to the ringer Doss goes through at the hands of his fellow soldiers. His spiritual and moral character are put through a crucible and his only reward is to be court martialed. Long before the battlefield this film is already difficult to stomach but as an audience, we want to see ourselves in Doss. Here is a man who as a child nearly killed his brother with a rock in a fight. He knows the toll violence can take and he refuses with all his heart to take up arms ever again. We all wish to be as strong as he is when tested to this level so it’s hard to look away.
Though our hero is a pacifist, that doesn’t stop Hacksaw Ridge from being the goriest war movie to ever come out of Hollywood. Gibson directs a battlefield littered with entrails, gushing flames, and contorted bodies. Blood rains from the sky (a result of heavy naval shelling) and trickles down the faces of infantrymen as they climb the enormous rope ladder up to the battlefield completely unaware that Gibson has assigned them each a place in the seventh circle of hell. The film’s first battle sequence feels breathless and endless, a tidal wave of violence that knocks the wind out of you as a viewer. As this sequence goes on we start seeing more and more from Doss’ point of view and in these moments we see all the horrors of war, not just specifics of the single battle being shown. Doss comes across a Japanese officer who committed suicide, his body dangling from the ceiling of an underground tunnel. He watches American and Japanese soldiers scream and fight for their lives over a tossed grenade before it blows them to bits. He even comes across a man buried up to his neck in the muck thanks to the force of artillery explosions. Throughout this horror the only time he ever picks up a rifle is to use it as a makeshift stretcher to get a wounded man off the battlefield.
With the exception of his wife Dorothy, a nurse who inspires Doss to become a medic, Hacksaw Ridge’s other characters all exist to represent challenges to the faith that Doss considers synonymous with his duty. From his drill sergeant (Vince Vaughn) to his alcoholic father (Hugo Weaving), a World War 1 veteran whose physical abusiveness is complicated rather than forgiven by the lengths he goes to help his son.
Hacksaw Ridge feels like the most refined of Gibson’s directorial projects so far. The violence on display is as intense as any he’s subjected us to before, but it feels more purposeful now. Desmond Doss is more compelling a screen character than even Passion of the Christ’s depiction of Jesus because Doss is allowed to have human conflicts. This film also takes a difficult position and holds to it. War has always been a part of human history. Violence occurs every moment of every day. But the best of us are represented in Desmond Doss about two-thirds of the way through Hacksaw Ridge: a lone figure, having just helped another wounded soldier down the side of the escarpment, turning his back to the camera to hobble back into the lingering cloud of smoke to look for one more.
