Review: Hacksaw Ridge - a podcast by SYN Media

Hacksaw Ridge is quickly turning into the must-see film of the year: the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a pacifist army medic who saved the lives of 75 World War II soldiers without ever holding a weapon. It's that powerful combination of a visceral war film, a compelling social justice story and a very poignant biopic that always gets people talking.

Audiences all seem to be appreciating a journey into the hellfire of war that leaves them with more than just a feeling of pointlessness. Critics all seem to be praising the juggling act of depicting such huge scale events on such a personal level. As always, I’m sure the Academy will be very generous with a film telling such an important historical true story. Meanwhile, everyone looks thrilled to see director Mel Gibson bringing himself back into the Hollywood good books.

Screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight chronicle the personal life, early rejection, spectacular heroics and later veneration of the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour. As a Seventh Day Adventist, he refuses to ever physically harm a fellow human being, takes the seventh commandment - “Thou shalt not kill" - in its most literal sense, and recognises Saturday as the Sabbath. Throughout his military training, his superiors and fellow soldiers find all of this supremely irritating. They think he's just trying to get an extra day off, that he's doing all this for attention, that he's a coward who’s too scared to fight but too ashamed to stay at home, or that maybe he’s just insane. Sergeant Howell (a surprisingly credible Vince Vaughn) tries both the stick and the carrot, neither of which can persuade him to leave. Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) tries to convince him that the better translation is "Thou shalt not commit murder," which apparently doesn't apply in a time of war, although of course once you start making exceptions it’s hard to know where to stop. That said, Doss has no political sympathies with Japan. Just like his beloved brother, Hal (Nathaniel Buzolic), Desmond is determined to protect his country on the battlefield, even though their jobs in the shipyard would have made both of them eligible for deferment. As Desmond sees it, the only difference between him and his brother, or any of the other soldiers, is that he wants to serve his country by saving lives instead of taking them. In his words: “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don't seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.” This is the climax of the speech he eventually has to give in front of a court martial, which is, in the film at least, the tipping point of his stalemate with the military. While they are moved enough to reconsider sending him to prison, they are still far from truly understanding his views. Needless to say, the day after the Battle of Okinawa, after he spends the entire night trawling through enemy territory rescuing mutilated soldiers, they all come to respect him, and his beliefs. As Glover puts it, the soldiers might not all believe the way he does, but they believe in how much he believes. Similar to Chris Kyle, whose life was chronicled in Clint Eastwod’s American Sniper (2015), Desmond quickly becomes the stuff of legend, someone who makes the men feel as safe as you can when you're heading into battle with the ruthless Japanese forces.

Unsurprisingly, given that this is an American depiction of the war, the Japanese soldiers are largely demonised. After being talked about throughout the first half of the film, and having their handiwork shown by truckloads of bleeding corpses, they make their first appearance in a long, gruelling battle scene, one that perfectly balances chaos and suspense. They are essentially portrayed as scary goons to be blown down. Most of their dialogue isn’t even subtitled. There's really only one character among them, the commander who would rather die than surrender, though he appears far too late to really humanise the enemy side. Every atrocity they committed is foregrounded, so as to prevent the morality of the war effort itself being called into question.

Meanwhile, over in the American camp, an array of the usual colourful characters are introduced from the beginning, though fortunately none of the cliches actually end up playing out. They all feel like real people, probably because most of them actually were, but even the invented or composite characters avoid becoming stock soldier stereotypes. Still, apparently it was too much to show any of the misdeeds they would have been party to on the American side of the battle. Even though the action scenes excel at capturing the scale of the conflict, they end up missing quite a lot of the complexity.

However, Hacksaw Ridge was never meant to be a docudrama about the Second World War. Above all else, this is Desmond’s story, and thankfully the complexities of his religious, ethical and personal beliefs are explored much more fully than the intricacies of the war.

The film introduces a harrowing childhood incident where, as he and Hal are fighting, Desmond picks up a brick and strikes his brother over the head with it, almost killing him. It also depicts their father, Tom (Hugo Weaving) as a raging alcoholic, who Desmond comes very close to shooting in the head when he attacks his mother, Bertha (Rachel Griffiths). This might be a fictionalised and exaggerated version of his early life, but it does retain the essence of the part his upbringing played in shaping his values, and later his choices. For instance, he first meets his future wife, a nurse named Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) on the day that he rescues an injured stranger from a fallen cart, drives him to the hospital and makes one of his many blood donations while he's there.

Once he eventually gets to the battlefield, it looks as though this one poignant little story might be swallowed up by the historical monstrosity that is World War II, but it isn't. The battle on Hacksaw Ridge was certainly great and terrible, but to those who knew him, Desmond Doss was even greater.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Further episodes of Art Smitten

Further podcasts by SYN Media

Website of SYN Media